We anarchists do not come out of nowhere. Our statements, tactics,
strategies, speeches, our political articulation in general arise fromthe revolutionary generations that preceded us. We are inserted in a
political tradition about which we have the conviction that it is the
seed of the revolution and that, throughout its victories and failures,
has fought for the Social Revolution. As they were, so we are. ----
Inserted in this red-and-black thread of combat, we have the historical
duty to move forward. We must find the tools that another generation had
already buried and raise a revolutionary anarchist position capable of
being equal to the historical moment in which we find ourselves. As we
are, so we will be.
From the first battles with the rising bourgeoisie to the most recent
political cycle, anarchists have organized themselves with the tools
they had at their disposal and acted with the knowledge they had
obtained and retained. We have been inserted into revolutionary
movements to the best of our abilities and have given our strength to
overcoming the capitalist system. To successfully carry out our
revolutionary task, anarchists equip themselves with the historical
balance, the tool to avoid mistakes, overcome the past and continue on
the right path.
Anarchists are inserted in a specific revolutionary political movement.
The adherents of anarchism have been specific militants, who have had a
specific practice, specific mistakes and successes, within the
revolutionary history of the working class. Anarchists cannot allow
themselves to claim in the same speech, for example, people as opposed
as Puig-Antich and Miquel Badia, or, in another example, the POUM,
militants of the CNT and the PSUC of the Transition at the same time. We
have our references, our dead, our historical thread to continue weaving.
Within this historical thread we have an episode of the international
class struggle on which relatively little light has been shed. Although
rivers of ink have been written about the Civil War, it has always been
written hegemonically from the perspective of only two sides: the
Republic and fascism. When the CNT or anarchism has been addressed
during the Spanish Revolution, it has usually been discussed within the
Popular Front side, although there were disagreements within it. The May
Events are the culmination, the high point of the disagreements in the
story, a more or less unfortunate confrontation, or a Civil War within
the Civil War.
In bourgeois historiography and opinion, these clashes are a disgrace, a
bloodshed of Catalans against Catalans due to uncontrolled anarchists.
This is the concealment of the facts. To combat bourgeois
historiography, it is necessary to present the revolutionary potential
of the rebels in the May Events, but also their limitations. It is
necessary to frame the Civil War as what it was, a crushed social
revolution, and represent its profoundly classist character, prefigured
by previous labor and social conflicts. Only in this way will we be able
to make a historical assessment worthy of its name and its necessity. It
is necessary to unearth the past, combat its characterization and
recover the lessons that we can extract from it.
Therefore, this article has three objectives.
First, combat bourgeois historiography, which distorts the facts and
places itself on one side of the trench through its appearance of
neutrality. Also combat other historical visions that dishonestly seek
to hide their errors and their role in the defeat.
Second, to outline a vision of history for the Libertarian Youth,
enhancing its role and becoming an agent in the fight for history.
Third, defend the need to open and participate in historical debates
about the Civil War, as they form part of the historical balance of the
working class.
Context towards the May Events
The working class defeated the coup d'état in the streets of Barcelona
on July 18, 1936. The key factor in this victory was the clandestine and
organized combat tool of anarchism: the Defense Committees of the CNT,
made up of CNT, FAI and Libertarian Youth militants, a tool attached and
subordinate to the CNT. It should be mentioned that the structure and
formalization of this clandestine organization was reformulated in the
report of the National Committee of Defense Committees of October 1934,
in the midst of the defeat of the proletarian rebellion in Asturias. In
other words, this tool emerged from the militant assessment that
organized anarchism made of its own activity.
As foreseen in the structure of the Defense Committees, they multiplied,
giving rise to a constellation of Coverage, Neighborhood, Control
Committees, etc. that were responsible for a multitude of revolutionary
tasks, such as supplying and recruiting the popular militias, feeding
the population, public control tasks and the suppression of bourgeois
forces.
With the defeat of the army, the libertarian movement spread throughout
the territory to make the Revolution effective, collectivizing land and
industries, persecuting the bourgeoisie and crossing the Principality
towards Zaragoza, to combat reaction.
However, with the army defeated, President Companys summoned the
political organizations to the Palau de la Generalitat on July 20. The
CNT made a decision that would shape its course: it accepted
collaboration within a broad front with the other anti-fascist forces,
in the Central Committee of Anti-Fascist Militias (CCMA).
The CCMA will not be a government nor will it allow it to govern. It
will try to play dual power with the Government, until the latter
absorbs it two months later. However, this will have two important
repercussions on anarchist militancy.
First, it will place anarchism, in superior strength in Catalonia, in a
situation of equal power with the rest of the organizations. That is, it
will give political character to minority organizations that act (in
theory and in practice) against the ongoing revolution, giving them the
tools to grow and to oppose the revolutionary conquests, organizations
that had no other credentials to be there than the quality of
anti-fascists and the ability to mobilize armed forces.
Second, it will equate anarchist organizations with political parties in
character. The representatives of the CNT will be required to impose the
discipline of the CCMA and, later, of the government, on their
militancy. A substantial part of the grassroots militancy of the
anarchist organizations opposes the entry of the CNT and the FAI into
the CCMA and, later, will oppose many of the measures taken in these
spaces. This militancy opposes the militarization of militias,
government inspectors in factories or the reactivation of the forces of
order because these are the measures of the enemy against whom they had
been forged by fighting: the State.
From then on, the anarchist militants would carry out their activity
under two opposing pressures: the exercise of the functions conquered on
July 18 and the tendency towards centralization under a single
anti-fascist government.
The CNT and the FAI will create a "Committee of Committees[1]"
responsible for making quick decisions and convincing the militancy of
the need for the CNT and the FAI to enter the CCMA. They will believe in
the strength and ability to negotiate in an advantageous position in the
CCMA and the Generalitat, but they will mold themselves in the esprit de
corps of the parties with which they shared space. In the name of the
revolution they will embark on the construction of a strong state and
will appease all resistance to it.
The revolutionaries who transformed social relations in the July days
would see their conquests sabotaged and annulled: the hibernation of the
Confederal Defense Committees, the dissolution of the Control Patrols,
the intervention of the Generalitat in collectivized industries and the
militarization of the militias, while the PSUC and the PCE formed an
internal repression body directed against the POUM and the CNT, which
would end up crystallizing in the Military Information Service.
The Libertarian Youth of Catalonia will form part of this militant base
that opposes the destruction of revolutionary conquests. Having bled in
the July days and actively participated in the controls and assaults of
those days, the libertarian youth opposed the entry of anarchism into
the government. In their multiple local dissemination organs and in the
Ruta, the libertarian youth expressed the contradiction of "state
anarchism" and the renunciation of principles in the direction of the
defeat of fascism.
In this climate, on April 26, 1937, Antonio Martín Escudero was
assassinated in Bellver de Cerdanya. Antonio Martín was a long-time CNT
militant who had been wounded in the Tragic Week. The local Committee of
Puigcerdà, chaired by himself, controlled the border crossing in
Cerdanya, preventing the escape of bourgeois and clerical elements and,
more importantly, it pursued and controlled the smuggling of food by
speculators allied to Estat Català and the PSUC[2]who crossed the border
to sell their products in Barcelona at stratospheric prices, outside the
control of the CNT Supply Committees. This assassination would provoke a
government crisis that would prelude the May Events.
The Libertarian Youth in Catalonia during the Revolution
The Joventuts Llibertarias[3], formed in 1932, suffered from little
organic development when July 1936 arrived. This did not prevent them
from being an active part of the armed reaction against the coup d'état.
We will list some examples. In the days before the coup d'état they held
night watches in their neighbourhoods and towns, ready to act. In the
July days they took action. The militancy of the JJLL of Santa Coloma de
Gramenet and Sant Adrià del Besòs participated in the siege of the Sant
Andreu barracks, and the latter also set up a barricade on the bridge
over the Besòs river. The JJLL of Barceloneta were present at the
barricades on Avinguda Icària. The JJLL of La Torrassa assaulted the
Pedralbes barracks. The JJLL of Maresme took weapons from the Mataró
barracks.
During this first phase of the Civil War, the JJLL of Catalonia were
integrated into the joint actions of anarchism: they participated in the
Control Patrols, in the Columns of militiamen, in collectivizations...
This can be understood by the widespread practice of dual CNT-FIJL
militancy.
The Libertarian Youths founded, with the related Student Federation of
Free Consciences, the Popular University, in the building of the
Seminary Conciliar of Barcelona. This was considered a preliminary step
for the training of workers and their access to official universities,
which would allow them to overcome the economic barrier of entry and
teach with methodologies that had a social vision. In addition, under
the leadership of their Regional Committee, they seized premises and
filled them with cultural, propaganda, educational and community
activities, seeking progress in the people that would lead them to
Libertarian Communism.
In 1937, the Joventuts Llibertarias de Catalunya had around 34,000
members and 214 groups. They were part of the militias at the front, and
opposed the militarization of the militias and the retreat in
revolutionary conquests. They found in the reactivation of the CNT
Defense Committees[4]the place to strengthen themselves to defend these
positions, together with their fellow CNT and FA members, and the
recently created Agrupación de Los Amigos de Durruti. They also
proclaimed in the Ruta that it was necessary to be alert to
counter-revolutionary maneuvers.
The events of the May Events
By decree of 4 March (approved by the councillors of the Generalitat,
including the anarchists) the Defence Committees were to be dissolved,
which went underground. The Control Patrols[5]were also threatened with
dissolution, and de facto neutralized until their effective dissolution
and persecution in June, which led to the exile of a large number of
their members[6].
In the second half of March 1937, the Confederal Defense Committee of
Barcelona prepared a "Plan for the Structure of the Defense Cadres and
Committees", under the following reason:
"With the universal collapse of parties and systems, only the
Revolutionary Proletariat remains standing, with its program of
reorganization of labor and economic and social equality."
The JJLL of Catalonia maintained a position of watchfulness and public
defense of revolutionary conquests, opposed to the unity government to
which the libertarian organizations were to be subordinated and to the
retreat in collectivizations and popular militias. In Ruta of April 1,
1937 they wrote:
"Before we renounce the fight against fascism, we will die in the
trenches! Before we renounce the revolution, we will die on the
barricades! (...) Never turn back! Stop the counterrevolution!"
On April 12, 1937, the Plenary of the Barcelona Local Federation of
Anarchist Groups (the Barcelona city organ of the FAI), to which the
Libertarian Youth and the Defense Committees had been invited, demanded
the withdrawal of the CNT members from the government and created an
Insurrectionary Committee. On April 15, the formation of a new
Government was agreed upon to overcome the crisis, with Aurelio
Fernández as an anarchist councilor. On April 27, as we have said
before, Antonio Martín was assassinated, and the government was
dissolved[7]. It is worth highlighting the searches and disarmaments of
JJLL militants by the Civil Guard and Assault during the nights during
these weeks, when they resolved to patrol together with the Anarchist
Groups to avoid confrontations.
Prior to the May Events, incidents also occurred in the town of
Vinalesa, where an attempt was made to shoot 150 anarchists from the
collectivized textile and tile factories. A "captain with a little
humanity" managed to avoid execution[8]. In Barcelona, there was also a
"bread war" between Joan Comorera of the PSUC and the Supply Committees
due to public opinion in the face of the state of hunger and high food
prices suffered by the population, where the former called for the
restoration of the free market prior to the Revolution as a solution[9].
In the town of Cistella, militants of the minority nationalist party
"Estat Català" arrested the JJLL militant Josep Planells for wanting to
form a local Libertarian Youth. Militants of the same party shot a young
libertarian on May 2 at a meeting of the Front de la Joventut
Revolucionària[10].
Finally, it is necessary to mention the struggle for the militarization
of the militias, which led to the creation of the group Los Amigos de
Durruti from the Fourth Group of the Durruti Column.
On May 3, 1937, around noon, three trucks full of Assault Guards led by
Rodríguez Salas, of the UGT, positioned themselves in front of the
Telefónica building, controlled by the CNT. The Stalinist militant, with
the signature of the Minister of Internal Security Aiguader (an ERC and
Estat Català activist) sought to reestablish state ownership of the
communications center, which was the responsibility of the Republic. He
stormed the building, and the CNT militants defended themselves. The CNT
Defense Committees were warned of this movement by Manuel Escorza del
Val, of the CNT Information Service, and supporter of the April 15
government pact.[11]
In immediate response and following the orders of the CNT Defense
Committees, barricades were erected throughout the city. The Local
Federation of Anarchist Groups took responsibility and led the fight,
lifting the siege of the building, taking the artillery batteries of
Montjuïc and creating a CNT Revolutionary Committee on May 4th.
The Group of Friends of Durruti established its headquarters at the
intersection of La Rambla and Carrer Hospital, linking up with the
barricades of the Defense Committees and about forty militiamen who had
descended on Barcelona in the previous days.[12]
On the 4th and 5th, the Sants Defense Committee stormed the Guard of
Assault barracks in Plaça d'Espanya and the Guard of the National Guard
in Casarramona.[13]President Companys appealed to the central government
to use aviation to bomb Barcelona, but his plea was rejected. At the
meetings of Los Amigos de Durruti on 4 May, the JJLL encouraged them to
continue the fight .[14]In Tarragona, the JJLL fired on the building
occupied by the UGT, and on the 6th, the forces of Public Order,
together with members of ERC, UGT and PSUC, stormed the JJLL
headquarters. Similar events occurred in Tortosa, Figueres and Maresme,
and members of the JJLL also traveled to Barcelona to take part in the
fight.
Having won in the streets, the anarchist militancy lays down its arms
when the CNT Higher Committees appeal for anti-fascist unity on the
radio. García Oliver's speech[15]lowers the spirits of the rebelling
militants, and a group of the CNT Regional Commissions, the FAI and a
JJLL commission approach the barricades to negotiate. On Friday the 7th,
some workers, discouraged by the surrender of the CNT and POUM
leadership, return to the barricades, but the lack of strength of Los
Amigos de Durruti and the promises of the CNT and FAI leadership make
the latter abandon the barricades. The CNT leadership declares that the
CNT and FAI continue to collaborate faithfully with the Government[16].
In García Oliver's speech, it is argued that it was necessary to disarm
the resistance so that it would not give rise to the bloody and brutal
elimination of organized anarchism. Reality showed that the end of the
resistance meant the beginning of the bloodiest phase of the physical
and bloody elimination of anarchism by the PSUC, the PCE and the
nationalist parties. We will make a brief report, by no means exhaustive
given the magnitude of the counterrevolutionary repression, trying to
focus on the murders immediately following the May Events to refute
García Oliver's claim.
On May 4, five young libertarians from the JJLL of l'Harmonia (currently
the Sant Andreu del Palomar neighborhood) were traveling by car through
Barcelona. After crossing Gran Via de la URSS (currently Avinguda
Meridiana), on Passeig Pujades, they were stopped by gunfire. Days
later, the same car would appear with shrapnel holes inside the Carlos
Marx barracks of the PSUC. On May 8, a Red Cross ambulance unloaded 12
brutally mutilated corpses next to a vineyard near Cerdanyola, and on
May 9, a photographer, called by the Defense Minister of Cerdanyola,
photographed the 12 corpses, one of them with the initials CNT
embroidered on his blue overalls.
On May 5, Camilo Berneri and Francesco Barberi (the former, publicly
critical of the CNT's collaboration with other political forces) were
shot dead in the street after being kidnapped from their home. The two
Italian anarchists had the misfortune of living right in front of a UGT
headquarters, where the PSUC erected a barricade to protect the
confederal advance towards the Generalitat from Via Durruti (now Via
Laietana). UGT militants claimed that they had permission to search the
house due to the suspicion of the presence of "armed Italian anarchists"
and "counter-revolutionaries". An ambulance collected their bodies from
the street for an autopsy. The former, a long-time anarchist militant,
was buried discreetly and without honors under the orders of the CNT's
higher committees "so as not to inflame spirits"[17].
On 7 May, "communist assassins" kidnapped Alfredo Martínez Hungría, of
the JJLL and the FAI, and murdered him. His body was never found, and it
is believed that it is one of the corpses that was later found in
Cerdanyola del Vallès[18]. On the morning of 7 May, around fifty
anarchists were arrested in Tarragona and 12 were shot, including Juan
Rua, of the Joventuts Llibertarias.
After the May Events, there was a general repression of the POUM, which
also participated in the days, and of the libertarian movement. The
first was outlawed and persecuted, its leader Andreu Nin disappeared and
its militants dispersed or shot. The complete disarticulation of the
revolutionary order conquered in the July days goes beyond this article,
but it includes Líster's advance towards Aragon to dissolve the
collectivizations, the militarization of the militias and of labor, the
censorship of the media and the freedom of the SIM and the agents of the
USSR to arrest, torture, execute and send to labor camps[19]anyone at
will. With the revolutionary power defeated, the counterrevolution
advances without stopping, and, consequently, the reaction.
The significance of the May Events
We anarchists do not believe in the triumph of the will over social and
material realities, but rather in the unity of means and ends, in the
determination of the latter by the former. We have a program,
libertarian communism, which is based on an objective, the defeat of the
State. We believe that these ends require specific means, specific forms
of practice, which we do not believe were discovered at a specific
moment in history but are determined by the historical balance.
As outlined earlier, early 20th century anarchism had a strong
trajectory of struggle. This was deployed on many fronts (labor,
housing, military, cultural, etc.), and we can say that it tended, or
had the will to tend, towards framing all the aspects in which the
reality of the working class is presented. This struggle was developed
in an anti-state sense, in the discrediting of bourgeois institutions,
in developing the strength of the working class, in conquering advances,
building referentiality and heading towards a horizon of victory over
the bourgeoisie and its army that seemed possible and feasible.
Collaboration with the government of the Generalitat, ministerial
portfolios in the regional and central governments, anti-fascist unity
as a weapon to disavowal revolutionary conquests, the belief in a strong
state to subdue the enemy, the creation of Higher Committees with
decision-making power over the militancy... in short, "renouncing
everything but victory"[20], implies a change in the means that had been
used until July 18, 1936, and, therefore, prefigures a different end.
The May Events of 1937, as a turning point in the advance of the
counterrevolution, imply the rubric of this disconnection between means
and ends.
The adherence to the strong state program by the representative
committees of the CNT, FAI and FIJL represents a betrayal. The same
cannot be said of the PSUC, ERC, PCE and Estat Català, which carried it
as their banner from the beginning of the confrontation, and therefore,
one cannot speak of betrayal of principles. Counterrevolutionary
propaganda argues for the infiltration of fascist elements into the POUM
and the CNT, an alleged betrayal or a lack of loyalty that represents a
de facto alliance with Franco. However, just as in the past we have
argued for a continuity between the ERC gunmen and the Francoist
repressive apparatus[21], we can also argue for an equality between the
repressive apparatus of the counterrevolution and the Francoist
repressive apparatus. Ensconced in state power and with revolutionary
power disarticulated from May 1937, the Military Information Service,
the High Treason and Espionage Court, the NKVD[22]and the militancy of
the PSUC first and the PCE later applied their program of strong state
and iron discipline. They defeated the other parties in the struggle for
control of the state, and used the same means on the working class to
achieve anti-fascist unity as those used by the Francoist side to
achieve national and ideological unity on their side of the trenches:
arrest, imprisonment, torture, execution, labor camp, military tribunal,
exile. With equal means, equal ends are reached: the defeat of the
working class.
The revolutionary defeat during the May Events highlights the importance
of defending, as an organization, the unity between means and ends, a
guiding principle of anarchism.
On the need for strategic organization and the empowerment of the
working masses
There is also a legend about the May Events that the insurrection and
the raising of the barricades were the work of the spontaneous action of
the working masses. This legend must be refuted: the Defense Committees
coordinated the insurrection on May 3, 1937 in the same way that they
coordinated the defense against the coup d'état on July 18, 1936. The
Defense Committees, together with the Neighborhood and Area Committees,
formed an organized militant network that was in close contact with the
suffering of the working class of Barcelona during the bread war,
supported by militants of the specific anarchist organizations, the
anarcho-syndical and the grouping of Los Amigos de Durruti. Together
they were able to give strategic instructions to the working class and
generate their own leadership, in (temporary) opposition to the high
echelons of the CNT.
The rebels were defeated by word, by the trust and loyalty they had in
the CNT, but they would not have had much recourse to military means
either. The uprising of Los Amigos de Durruti is the highest point of
revolutionary clarity of the working class in Catalonia, but also the
expression of defeat in the face of an offensive that had begun in the
last days of July 1936. The Amigos de Durruti "were barricade people,
they were not good organizers, and even worse theorists, although they
had good journalists"[23], and "only" included 5000 militants. Even so,
they were able to generate enough referentiality, have enough double
militancy in the organs of the CNT and enough influence within the
working class to take the city of Barcelona for four days.
No other specific organization in Catalonia could have taken on this
role. On the one hand, the FAI had "disappeared", had been inserted into
the CNT in its revolutionary conquests, in collectivizations, militias,
positions of responsibility... and had largely ceased its activity at
the beginning of the Civil War[24]. However, it was the local anarchist
groups in Barcelona that formed a Revolutionary Committee. On the other
hand, the Joventuts Llibertarias were a very young organization, with
little organic history, a quality with which we can also describe
Mujeres Libres. Nevertheless, they were faithful to their principles and
put their bodies on the streets in May 1937.
We specifists claim the need for an anarchist strategic organization for
the defense of class independence. Like the Amigos de Durruti and the
FAI, an anarchist organization is necessary that is capable of
transforming the suffering and exploitation of the working class into a
strategy capable of overcoming the state of affairs, side by side with
the organization of the working class.
The defense of class independence also implies the defense of workers'
democracy within the grassroots organizations. It is clear that with the
formation of the "Committee of Committees", its irrevocability and its
leading role over the libertarian movement, the principle of
revocability of positions typical of the libertarian movement was
broken. There was no situation of control over one's own representation
within the CNT, which was the organization of the working class in
Spain, nor in the specific anarchist organizations. The framing within
the program of the strong state also broke with the confederal pact on
the program of Libertarian Communism, approved at the CNT Congress of
1936. These two breaches represent a break with the principles of
collective responsibility and strategic unity that we demand as
especifists.[25]
We repeat: to overcome ourselves as a class, the next struggles we wage
must necessarily develop towards the horizon of libertarian communism.
In this direction, the strengthening of the anarchist strategy and the
construction of referentiality before the broad masses of the working
class are indispensable. However much strategic role Los Amigos de
Durruti or the specific organizations may have had, it was the working
masses of Barcelona, framed in the Defense Committees, in popular
militias or in other political organizations, who took to the streets on
May 3, 1937.
Finally, we want to establish that we see a qualitative difference
between the sides of counterrevolution and reaction. We believe that the
current of opinion that advocates that fascism and authoritarian
communism are the same distorts history. Although the SIM agent and the
Francoist policeman share means, they do so from a completely different
relationship towards the revolutionary movement, just as the PSUC
militant who participates in a check on Vilamajor Street and the
Falangist who makes left-wing militants disappear act extrajudicially
and legally at the same time, but from different institutionalities.
This distinction between counterrevolution and reaction also allows us
to separate counterrevolution from revolution, and to argue that the
Higher Committees of the specific anarchist organizations and the
government positions of the CNT and FAI formed part of the
counterrevolution by submitting to the esprit de corps of the CCMA, the
Catalan Government and the central Government.
Revolution, counter-revolution and reaction are the three sides of the
Spanish Revolution. With this article we hope to have positioned
ourselves on the first of the sides, to claim ourselves as an
alternative to avoid the second as the best way to eliminate the third.
We also hope to have opened another trench in the fight to recover the
history of the Revolution and to give it the balance it deserves.
Batzac-Libertarian Youth
https://www.regeneracionlibertaria.org/2025/05/03/els-fets-de-maig-i-les-joventuts-llibertaries/
_________________________________________
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