Explanatory note: this article belongs to the biography "Abraham
Guillén. Guerrilla and self-management" published by the GeneralConfederation of Workers' Solidarity in 2020 and written by José Luis
Carretero Miramar. We deeply thank the Author and the Workers'
Solidarity Union for agreeing to share an entire chapter with us. We
also heartily thank them for the task of rescuing the history and
contributions of revolutionary strategic theory of a libertarian who
should not be forgotten.
Is it feasible, or even desirable, to vindicate Guillén today? Does his
thought have any kind of functionality for social transformation at the
doors of the second decade of the 21st century? Is Guillén only a son of
the developmentalist and technophile 20th century whose fundamental
perspectives have been overtaken by the unfolding of the ecological
crisis, the enthronement of institutional politics as the only way of
translating the desires and needs of those below, and the ubiquity of
the "culture wars"? Is there room for a "Guillénism" in a cultural
universe dominated by postmodernism, Trumpian metapolitics and the
passions of identity? Let's see it, trying to unravel what are the
fundamental axes of Guillén's thought and its applicability to the
current social and political scene, beyond the rubbish generated by
Abraham's abundant verbosity and the deceitful flashes of those who
reduce our biographee to a simple empty signifier of virtual "riotporn."
In a recent telephone conversation from the Castilian village where he
now lives, Mariano de la Iglesia, the unwavering friend who looked after
his last heartbeats, told us that Guillén "analysed the events of
reality instead of being with ideology all day long." This is a
magnificent summary of what is essential in Guillén's work, and that
today should be enough to vindicate his name and his legacy in contrast
to the usual sermons of the current transformative left (the
revolutionary thing, it seems, is no longer claimed by anyone). A
prudish, moralistic, tremendously boring and sectarian left, addicted to
pastoral utopias that call for passivity, to the "sad passions" of which
Spinoza spoke, to dogmatic phraseology about identity and to the
supposedly learned denial of its own condition as a subject.
There are three fundamental axes of Guillenian thought that we can begin
to confront with a reality that is the absolute defeat of the
revolutionary project, among other reasons due to its absence in the
social struggles of our time, and its replacement by a viscous amalgam
of confessed or unconfessed social democratic desires, rampant
narcissism that seeks a comfortable place under the sun of virtual fame,
and supposedly justified lack of solidarity by force of flogging the
always useful spectre of Machiavelli translated by the most golden
academic caste, which has managed to totally dissociate theory and
praxis in our minds with a morass of unconnected words.
These three essential concepts are: anti-imperialism, urban guerrilla
warfare and self-management. The three great fields of knowledge and
praxis in which Guillén stood out, and which he analysed, lived and
analysed, with his letters and his body, to the ultimate consequences.
Guillén's anti-imperialism is the first of his theoretical proposals,
and the basis of much of his practical experience in Latin America.
Guillén thus confronts the Eurocentric conception of much of the current
Western left, illuminating with absolute clarity the mechanisms that
generate inequality, misery and violence in the Third World (what others
have called the Periphery of the capitalist system).
Unequal exchange and the exploitation of raw materials from the South
are constitutive and essential elements for the existence of the
consumer society of the North. International organizations such as the
IMF and the World Bank work as executors of the brutal economic
blackmail that guarantees abundance in the rich neighborhoods of the
West. The Marine Corps and the military coups encouraged by the liberal
embassies are the stick that accompanies the carrot of foreign
investment and international credits. Faced with the unstoppable
tendency towards paralyzing moralism of the NGOs of our time and the
socialization of "guilt" practiced by the great philanthropic
foundations of the billionaires of the North, Guillén knows that the
only possible way out of the titanic pain of the South is through social
struggle. And that the only fair option for those of us who look at
these struggles from here is an effective solidarity that goes beyond
verbosity and paternalism.
One struggle. The same struggle. In the North and in the South. The
struggle against Capital. Far from the recourse to "exoticism" that fits
so well in the ideological garb of the progressive Western
intellectuals. Far from the nonsense about the "primordial purity"
(social, spiritual or economic, it doesn't matter) of the original
peoples, who want to be stuck in time forever, without a voice and a
dynamism of their own, in order to feed the doctoral theses of the
children of the petite bourgeoisie of the North. Far from the
paternalistic view of those who choose to support only what speaks the
same discourse as one, or that one can comfortably translate into one's
own proposal, even if it is based on logical pirouettes that no one will
denounce because the South is very far away, even if the real struggles
go in another direction.
Guillén knows that the indigenous people, like all the inhabitants of
the planet, probably want autonomy, respect for their own institutions
and traditions; spirituality and care for nature, but also, quite
possibly, running water, a free and universal health system and access
to the means of production to work them collectively. The South does not
denounce "progress," because in reality this has never happened; but
rather the "progressive" verbosity of the conquerors. It does not want
to be "imitated" in their songs, rituals or myths; but rather concrete
solidarity in the real struggle for real objectives.
And to win real struggles, beyond the foggy disquisitions of alternative
academic tribes, a real policy of alliances is necessary. Let us agree
on something basic: capital is stronger, it has more resources, more
firepower, more military, cultural, economic, political forces. More
money, which is a general equivalent that can be exchanged for anything
else. None of us is going to defeat it alone. We have to strike
together. And this, even if we do not think the same about what we are
going to do next or to which gods (divine entities or theoretical
paradigms) we should pray. It does not matter if we want to mourn Lenin,
Bakunin, Jesus Christ, Buddha or Al-Afghani: if we want to stop being
mourners and take control, the construction of a great revolutionary
social alliance is the first task of the day.
This is a basic point of Guillenian thought. The anti-imperialist
struggle needs a great transversal alliance (as it is now called) that
incorporates militants of diverse ideologies; social sectors that range
from the urban proletariat or rural laborers, to the national petty
bourgeoisie. Anarchists, communists, Trotskyists, republicans, but also
grassroots Christians, self-employed and small businessmen not tied to
the global market, and military with a patriotic and anti-colonial
conscience. Too much fuss for the builders of theoretical systems of
immaculate purity, who are never stained by concrete reality and who
ramble on about the ideal society when "all this falls by itself"
(something that has never happened), which are so abundant today.
That is why the alliance has to be built on the real, material,
effective needs of the struggles, and not on the compatibility of the
speeches with the great mantras of sectarians of all kinds. To build the
alliance it is necessary, as Guillén said, "to stop thinking that it is
enough to change the name of things", because, as he also said:
"contradictions are only resolved by action".
And this project of alliance necessarily leads us to an open critique of
the postmodern texture of the current Western left. A critique that, we
warn, does not advocate a return to the old certainties of Marxist or
anarchist orthodoxy; but rather the affirmation of the urgent need for
connection over self-analysis.
Let us explain: we have already had more than sixty years of ideological
hegemony of the different branches of postmodernism in social movements.
Although some people like to talk about a "neo-anarchism" or a "New
Left" to describe their theories, a large part of the activists of the
movements have already spent decades experimenting with these novelties.
And the empirical result, let's be realistic, has been quite poor.
Political postmodernism and its associated discourses (whether
Negrinian, Foucauldian, etc.) are constituted in opposition to the
orthodox discourses of the left of modernity, to the narrow positivism
and the "wooden language" of the Soviet or Sovietizing extreme left, but
not only to it, but also to Eurocentric universalism, to unscientific
scientism and to the alienating understanding of the party tool
disseminated by Marxism-Leninism.
This is perhaps a necessary break with a world in decline. But the
practical legacy of postmodernism, applied in social movements as a
hegemonic discourse in recent decades, has been truly disappointing. I
do not think it can be denied that we are much worse off than before,
that we have accumulated defeats and that we have lost all shared
discursive universe. In these circumstances, there is a widespread
dissatisfaction, diffuse but real, bordering on open disaffection, with
respect to postmodern discourse and practices in the movements.
This dissatisfaction is the result of decades of defeats and, above all,
of self-imposed marginality. The passion for the self-analysis of
"really existing" postmodernism has operated as a gigantic dissolving
vortex in popular movements. By seeing power everywhere (the
microphysics of power), the movements have not only called into question
their very condition as political and social subjects, but have also
multiplied the exponential diffusion, in militant circles, of what the
Jesuits call "the Lucifer syndrome."
The "Lucifer syndrome" is a concept that serves to explain a certain
harmful functioning of a group that practices "spiritual exercises."
When a drift towards an exacerbated moralism occurs in the group, the
analysis of personal details from an aggressive perspective increases
and each person is openly blamed for things that are normal in the
social world in which we move, and therefore, with which we all have a
daily relationship of conflict (characterizing them as "collaboration
with the enemy," "great sins" or "insurmountable ideological defects"),
the subjects that make up the group begin to withdraw into themselves.
No one dares to speak, because everything can be understood as a
transgression and immediately punished. Distrust spreads among the
members of the group. The tendency towards effective and collective
practice of improvement dissolves in an unhealthy theater of
affirmations of conformity. Cliques fight for power without anyone being
able to make the situation explicit. It seems that Lucifer has taken
over the relationships between the members of the group, which have
become insincere, lacking in creativity and inhabited by an
inexpressible violence, even though, formally, there is no conflict on
the table. The group finally dissolves because its members prefer the
chaotic and exploitative outside world (which still admits some breaches
of freedom) to the densely damaging world of the sect turned in on
itself and dedicated to endless self-analysis.
Whatever the theorists of postmodernism may say (and even if this is
precisely what they want to denounce with their writings), the
postmodern passion for finding (and anathematizing) every trace of
micropower in relationships, applied in its effective practice,
constitutes, time and again, this type of scenario in the everyday life
of movements. An everyday life that becomes prudish, suffocating,
puritanical and, many times, inhabited by a deaf and inexpressible violence.
There is no doubt that postmodern criticism was necessary. It is not a
question of returning uncritically to the positivist orthodoxy of
modernity. What is happening is that postmodernism must be overcome.
Neo-anarchist theorists treat any criticism of their positions as a
return to the old, which is emotionally impossible and would be
damaging. They are stuck in an old debate that has long since ended.
They are, as the Sex Pistols said, "flogging a dead horse." What is now
trying to be put on the table is a new critique of postmodernism, a new
paradigm that will surely draw many ideas from the old (reinterpreting
and readapting them, as always happens in paradigm shifts) and also from
the postmodern.
This new critique is yet to be made in purely philosophical and
sociological terms, but it is already being pointed out in the effective
practice of those who are trying to reconstruct the movements, leaving
aside the postmodern praxis of the last decades. We will only point out
something that we believe is important in this path: after the stage of
searching for Truth (modernity), and the stage of self-analysis in
search of the web of micropowers (postmodernity), the era of connection
must arrive.
Postmodernism has had its virtues, no doubt, but it has also generated a
titanic distrust of the possibility of connection. Endless
self-analysis, the dissolution of the subject, the utopian search for
purity in relationships, have become insurmountable barriers to the
practice of dialogue. Even more so if we speak of dialogue with the
non-politicized masses, with "ordinary people." Connection, dialogue,
alliance. Above all, alliance. These are the fundamental axes that must
feed a new paradigm for a new revolutionary movement in an increasingly
fragmented and violent social world.
Guillén speaks to us about this because, among other things, he speaks
from revolutionary practice rather than from the academic pulpit. In
postgraduate studies, there is no doubt, all cats are gray. In the
streets, in the workplace, in evictions, listening and being sincere is,
perhaps, more important than having the Truth or over-analyzing each
interaction. The vigilant far right has sensed this crisis of the
postmodern paradigm and is trying to channel disappointment into
identity-based and authoritarian tones. They know what they are doing:
they are fighting for control and the design of the future paradigm,
while the theorists of the New Left and Neo-anarchism battle against the
spectre of their elders in a war that ended decades ago. The Trumpian
paradigm denies the connection in the name of "Us First," while
multiplying violence and increasing the social war of all against all.
In this scenario we cannot continue to be locked in an endless question
of "Who are we? What are the contradictions of my navel?"
And that brings us to the second fundamental axis of Guillén's thought:
Guillén is one of the greatest global theorists of urban guerrilla
warfare. A dangerous subject, this, in the times of the punitive
inflation of the National Court and the Criminal Law of the enemy.
But let us remember that Guillén announces that the guerrilla strategy
can only succeed if it is the war of an entire people against a common
enemy. If it has 80% of the population behind it. Otherwise (as in the
current scenario of most of the countries around us) it would be (as
Abraham himself says) nothing more than a bloody way of "raising the
hare so that others can hunt it down". We are not, as we all know, in
such a context in Spain at the beginning of the 21st century. A strategy
of armed struggle seems out of date at this stage of development of the
social conflict and of the revolutionary forces in our country. But
behind Guillén's strictly military proposal, there are a whole myriad of
concepts that are important for revolutionary practice in our time.
The main one is that in revolutionary war it is more important to
conquer population than to conquer territories or resources. This
statement, which we consider fully applicable to the political practice
of social and trade union movements, is based on the basic
differentiation between a bourgeois strategy of war (or conflict) and a
revolutionary one. And it completely breaks with what we have become
accustomed to hearing from the mouths of populist reformism in recent times.
In contrast to the Podemos and Errejonistas' strategy of "war of
positions", Guillén asserts that it is not a simple "war of movements",
but rather a "political-military" strategy aimed fundamentally at
"gaining population".
The preference for the "war of positions" of the electoral wing of the
left has a clear practical origin: it justifies the fight for seats, for
the institutional trenches in which to establish oneself. In addition,
it has a theoretical origin that is meant to be respectable: it follows
in the wake of Gramsci's "Prison Notebooks", who became an apostle of
cultural war, almost a star of postmodernity. Of course, they do not
tell us that Gramsci was rather a self-sacrificing and quite orthodox
militant of the Third International, who started from a marked
scientism; which is what leads him to defend the "war of positions" as
the form of "truly modern war", because it was the one that was
effectively practiced in the trenches of Verdun, between the contending
powers in the First World War. A prosaic origin for the sophisticated
Podemos diatribes on the strategy for the assault on institutions.
The truth is that, after the Nazi blitzkrieg at the beginning of the
Second World War, which allowed them to annihilate the supposedly
impregnable French "Maginot Line" thanks to the superior technology and
enormous mobility of their motorized divisions, modern military strategy
no longer follows the path of "positional warfare," trenches, and all
that nonsense. As Guillén repeatedly states in his work, frontal attacks
against a better-equipped enemy to capture hills are by no means a
brilliant military strategy for a revolutionary army.
The war that NATO forces are preparing for today is not a trench war, a
dispute over cities and territory; but a hybrid war in which, more than
territory, the loyalty of the population is at stake. In which the
social component itself becomes decisive against insurgent groups with
improvised weapons, spread out in large cities acting "like leopard
skin," as Guillén said. Technology, firepower and connectivity help
greatly to win these wars, but the policy of alliances and the political
program actually implemented become decisive. People are the great
resource, and the great objective of war: "people, ideas, machines, but
precisely in this order," said John Boyd, the American military man who
designed the imperialist strategy in the Gulf War.
That is why Guillén can help us to prefigure a hybrid revolutionary
policy, beyond armed struggle. A line that determines union or social
activity with the objective of winning population, and not seats or
purity tests. The Podemos war of positions leads us to control territory
(positions) and our influence on the population is increasingly less
(their minds and hearts are increasingly sensitive to the ultra-right
diatribes about identity). Entrenched in their seats, the friends of the
assault on institutions quickly forget that the connection with the
needs of the population is the first task. That the alliance is only
built with people, social classes, organized groups or not.
Let us not fool ourselves: revolutionary struggle is a special type of
conflict management, which implies different strategic guidelines than
those usually used in bourgeois politics and war. We will never, or at
least not in the foreseeable medium-term future, have greater firepower
than our adversary (access to the media, financing, technical
resources). We have to resolve this disproportion with a strategy that
avoids suicidal head-on clashes, "private wars" with the repressive
forces, and "focus" strategies that can be isolated, and that maximizes
population gains. We should not dedicate ourselves to digging trenches
and electing leaders with all the prerogatives, but rather move quickly
and engage in dialogue with the popular sectors. Above all, dialogue,
listening, cooperating, forming alliances, connecting the fragmented and
the dispersed.
And that brings us to the last axis of Guillén's thought:
self-management. Self-management is a viable project for the future,
because it is based on the power of cooperation, as an alternative to
the imposition of command. Self-management seeks alliance and
connection, because as Guillén indicates; it imposes the practical need
to federate and integrate experiences.
Self-management is a global alternative, but also a managing principle
of everyday life, of local space. It reconciles rights with
organization, and can allow (well managed) a non-alienating
collectivity, as well as favoring an individuality in full development,
but linked to the common.
The problematic aspect of Guillén's thinking, in relation to the
discourses of the current left, is the connection between his commitment
to self-management and his intuitions about the centrality of
technological progress in building a libertarian socialist society. In a
narrative world, that of current anarchism, which is committed to Deep
ecology, degrowth, and the critique of science, rationality and
modernity; Abraham's unequivocally developmentalist (but "in the good
sense"), rationalist and technophile discourse may seem out of date. But
it is also enormously necessary.
We must start from the basis that science has historically been a great
ally of the most consistent environmentalism. It is thanks to the
various scientific advances in biology, chemistry, statistics, medicine,
etc., that we know that the ecological crisis is real and is here. To a
large extent, environmentalism managed to become popular in the eighties
and nineties, thanks to this scientific umbrella of its discourse that
can explain to us, from the most pronounced rationality, that there is a
problem of climate change or what are the consequences and mechanisms of
the contamination of aquifers and ecosystems. In fact, Greta Thumberg
(if anyone bothers to listen to her speeches in the "original version")
does not stop repeating it: it is precisely science that tells us that
the ecological crisis is at the door and is unstoppable.
But to a large extent, militant and alternative environmentalism, and
even more so intellectual environmentalism and the various
eco-anarchisms, have focused on a different current of thought in
defense of the natural environment: Deep ecology, based on a destructive
critique of science, modernity, rationalism and technology.
Little attention has been paid in this regard to the very accurate
critical analysis that some founding fathers and prominent members of
the social ecology movement, such as Murray Bookchin or Janet Biehl,
have made of the expansion of these currents, highlighting their growing
traditionalist and reactionary drift. Nor has it mattered that Biehl and
Peter Standenmaier have warned us of the political power that the
extreme right derives from this type of approach, when they tell us the
history of the ecological current of National Socialism in their book
"Ecofascism".
The reactionary origins and traditionalist spiritualism of many of the
Deep Ecology gurus like Ellul are not accidental elements in their
worldview. Carried away by the irrationalist and global critique of
modernity and technology, the ecological movement has opened spaces for
traditionalist, supposedly communalist proposals (but understanding the
commune as a "total community"), tremendously sectarian and bordering on
the extreme right, like that of Félix Rodrigo Mora.
Metaphysical praises of the "old securities" and old institutions (the
family, the village community and its priests, "sacred" motherhood), the
longing for a "return" to the lost Arcadia, the expansion of a discourse
that does not want to submit to any kind of "narrowly rationalist"
paradigm and which therefore cannot be subjected to any criticism; have
proliferated in an eco-anarchist space that sometimes seems like a
revived Carlism, but more reactionary than that of the current express
Carlism.
In this scenario, Guillén's technophile and rationalist approach,
accompanied by an emerging ecological awareness, takes on a new meaning:
in contrast to proposals that speak to us of the need to go back, to the
primal goodness of pre-capitalist societies and medieval villages,
Guillén warns us that history never goes backwards, that everything
changes, but never returns to the beginning. Social cycles do not repeat
themselves identically, but rather qualitatively transformed. And
pre-capitalist societies, in one way or another and after a long
evolution, are precisely those that have given rise to the current
ecocidal vortex of capitalism. Even Theodore Kaczynski has narrated
this. The process of accumulation, and the tensions, contradictions and
inequalities associated with it, have been a material requirement for
the species in a world in which resources were scarce and the population
growing. And this cycle of transformation can only be channeled in a
virtuous manner for everyone and for the planetary ecosystem in a
society of abundance, where competition for basic resources is mitigated.
Abundance, we say. But, in Guillenian terms, the word abundance refers
to the possibility of having basic needs covered and of being able to
expand one's own individual potential. That has little to do with the
ecocidal consumption of capital society. Let us be more specific: with
the capital society of the North, with the shop windows of the
marketplaces of the large corporations of imperialist capitals.
This leads us to new controversial issues: what can we think, then, of
the decline or imminent collapse of capitalism that some insistently
announce?
Let us be clear: Guillén knows that the essence of the collapse of a
capitalism in full decline is that it has no end if we do not put an end
to it. The Roman Empire was collapsing for more than five hundred years
(more than a thousand, if we take Byzantium into account) and only fell
definitively with a strong external push, due to the massive migrations
of the so-called "barbarians". The Chinese civilization has already
collapsed a good number of times, but none of them has emerged a
madmaxist scenario nor has it really returned to the beginning of time
and a pure subsistence economy, abandoning everything learned along the way.
The increasing senility of capital society, the fact that it will come
to an end as all previous modes of production of humanity have done,
should not lead us to believe that the State, exploitation, the violence
of the powerful, will cease by themselves in a kind of self-induced
catharsis of their own contradictions, no matter what we do. Capital
also prepares for a possible collapse by accumulating resources. And in
a scenario of accelerated decomposition of the system, the warlords have
more advantage than the spiritual ecological gardeners, as they well
know in Somalia or Libya.
Thus, only revolutionary action can overthrow exploitation and
oppression, the capital society. Only action can turn collapse, which is
just another name for the growing nightmare of everyday life, into an
opportunity. And, when it comes to considering the problem of action, it
must be borne in mind that the discourses that call on the revolutionary
movement to "decomplexify, detechnologize, degrowth and deurbanize" are
calls to passivity and weakness.
There is nothing more complex than nature. The discourses that contrast
the supposed simplicity of nature with the supposed complexity of the
artificial are simple derivatives of religious thought, which defends
the pristine superiority of God's work over that of man. An ecosystem is
a much more complex system than any machine we have created. That is
precisely why our machines and our economic activities come into
conflict with the ecosystem: because in their design we have been too
simple and have not taken into account all the complexity of the
relationships of nature, its interdependence. It is not about being
"simpler", but about grasping complexity more deeply. An assembly is
much more complex than command and control. A self-managed society will
not be simpler, but more complex: it will be necessary to take everyone
into account, incorporate elements of participation that do not exist,
introduce the federative principle that creates structures that are much
less arborescent and more rhizomatic, etc.
A movement for the 21st century will have to build its strength in the
cities, in the great megalopolises. For the first time in history, more
than half of the world's population lives in large cities, in run-down
slums without basic services and always on the verge of social
explosion. Revolutionaries must not flee to give spiritual discourses to
cows in abandoned fields. Let us leave that to the apprentice prophets.
Those who live in the countryside will know how to build their own
discourse, and their own movement. Let us respect them. Revolutionaries
must organize the social struggle in the great concrete jungles, where
the people are, and in the shanty towns inhabited by the day laborers of
agribusiness. Before being able to build the agrovillages of the future,
putting an end forever to the contradiction between the countryside and
the city and the brutal ecological footprint of the megalopolises,
revolutionaries will have to organize and ally themselves with the
irritated and irritating masses (perhaps that is the problem) of the
slums, the shantytowns, the favelas, and the barriadas. Each thing in
its time.
And what about technology? A revolutionary movement that does not
master, understand and use all the technologies of its time is doomed to
failure. To abandon machines to the exploiters is to abandon our past
work so that it can be valorized by the masters. So that the masters
become ever stronger with the product of our work, and we become ever
weaker. Not to use science, technology and knowledge for the revolution
is to condemn oneself to perpetual defeat. Furthermore, as Guillén
repeatedly points out, only the liberation of technology (its liberation
from Capital) can liberate the human species by creating the society of
abundance.
Technology is a battlefield, like the unions, housing or ecology.
Technology, science and knowledge are the great bottlenecks currently
generated by the crisis of capital accumulation, which continues to
simmer after the Great Recession of 2008. We do not know how to
valorise, in terms of surplus value, technologies that advance
exponentially, but that have more potential for cooperation than for
commodification. The channelling of new technologies in the field of
permanent surveillance tools that capital is operating, should not make
us forget that their potential for the generation of knowledge and Big
Data for self-management are decisive. Guillén saw this with pristine
clarity and long before many others.
So these are the great redeemable elements of Guillén's thought:
anti-imperialism (or the alliance), revolutionary action (or the need to
gain population) and self-management (or cooperation for action on a
rationalist basis and the generation of shared knowledge).
We are talking about interdependence, connection, knowledge and action.
The idea of interdependence and connection has been largely advanced by
current ecofeminism and ecosocialism, provided that they are able to
detach themselves from their traditionalist, reactionary tendencies, in
which communalism is confused with the sectarian cult of the "total
community" and in which practical functioning is maximized based on the
"Lucifer syndrome."
The relationship between knowledge and action, dear readers, is the
great question of anarchism of all times. It was not in vain that
Guillén accused the anarchists, during the Civil War, of being
revolutionaries but not having prepared themselves to make the revolution.
One grows old when one substitutes illusions for regrets. That is what
has happened to the left and to the libertarian movement. Therefore,
instead of calling on the militants and active people of the popular
classes to join in the persistent regret and nostalgia for the past
world, or the uncritical, moralistic and passive admiration of what
never came to be, or of a future collapse; which, like the Last
Judgement, will separate the good from the bad in a catharsis against
which nothing can be done, we say to them, in the words of Henry Miller:
"Develop interest in life as you see it: in people, in things, in
literature, in music; the world is so rich, it is teeming with splendid
treasures, with beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget
yourself." Do.
Jose Luis Carretero Miramar
https://www.regeneracionlibertaria.org/2024/08/29/un-guillenismo-tras-guillen/
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