Continuation of the article that covered the Strategy and Organization of Galician anarchism, between 1871 and 1936, also published on this portal. By XESTA ORGANIZACIÓN ANARQUISTA GALEGA ---- The enormous repression exerted on anarchist organizations and militants during the Franco dictatorship, together with the organic decomposition suffered by the CNT during this period of clandestine activity, facilitated the hegemonization of the working class by the Marxist parties. The anarcho-syndicalists remained faithful to their principles, rejecting possibilist strategies, such as that of the Communist Party of Spain (PCE) of participating in the syndicalist structures of the Regime, with the intention of eroding it from within. Furthermore, internal quarrels between different currents prevented the anarchist ranks from organizing a unitary action to fight against the Regime. Four decades of repression and resistance, and the lack of a unified strategic plan led the CNT to a progressive distancing from the working masses.
The decomposition of the Franco regime once the dictator died, and the legalization of unions and political parties, meant a resurgence of the libertarian movement in the late 1970s. A resurgence that had its foundations in the context of the anti-Franco struggle in which groups such as Vangardas Ácratas Galegas or Colectivo Denuncia had emerged. Along with the refoundation of the Galician CNT in March 1977, a large number of anarchist groups sprang up across the country. But this happened in a very different context to the pre-war one, in which the capitalist system had made its exploitation model more complex, generating new relations of production, new jobs and also new subjectivities. Subjectivities by virtue of which the citizen and the consumer came to occupy symbolic spaces previously covered by the working class. A systemic reconversion that caused labor struggles, and with them unionism, to lose weight in the revolutionary movement, reducing the social bases of the unions by leaps and bounds, while many of their potential militants began to join the ranks of neighborhood, environmental, or cultural organizations, among many others.
According to this new context, new libertarian collectives were being founded throughout the Iberian Peninsula that were bringing new strategic visions to Iberian anarchism. In the words of Mikel "Tar" Orrantía, one of the founders of the Basque libertarian collective Askatasuna, what was at stake then was to achieve "overcoming the limitations of organization in a single field, be it labor, citizen, or any other that does not attack all aspects of the alternative revolutionary struggle head-on from a single anti-capitalist organization"1. Askatasuna brought to the forefront of the libertarian debate the need to carry out a "global" struggle against all the dynamics of capital exploitation, and not only against those that occur in the labor field, in addition to the need for the unity of the various revolutionary currents in this struggle, following the spirit of the First International. But, in addition to this, Askatasuna reopened two old debates in Iberian anarchism. On the one hand, what has to do with the organizational question, advocating for a dual scheme, in which on the one hand there would be class organizations, made up of all the workers and citizens of a specific area, and on the other the autonomous assembly movement, made up of groups, organizations and revolutionary militants who had committed to horizontal models of organization. This commitment to dualism was not an ex novo conception, but a classic organizational model of anarchism, already formulated by Bakunin in 1868 for his Alliance, and which had had various lines of continuity in Europe and America. On the other hand, Askatasuna reopened the debate on the national question within the libertarian movement, advocating for the independence of the Basque Country and becoming one of the first anarcho-independence groups in the Iberian Peninsula.
Among the groups founded in Galicia that claimed to be part of the anarchist milieu during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, several, following the lines of Askatasuna, assumed the centrality of the national question through previous Marxist militancy. This was the case of the Vangardas Ácratas Galegas (1967/68), the Grupo Anarquista Campesiño (1976/77) and the libertarian groups Arco da Vella (1980/82) and Zona Aberta (1981/82), which were pillars of the Anarcho-Communist Galician Federation as early as the early 1980s. However, none of these groups seem to have developed a theoretical-strategic line or a program of intervention in Galician society, as the Basque anarchists had done. On the one hand, Arco da Vella, after its foundation in 1979 as an anarcho-communist organization, seems to have exhausted all its efforts in the following years in the publication of a magazine of the same name which, lacking a specific political line, functioned more as a continent of Galician libertarian culture than as a political organization. However, the libertarian collective Zona Aberta, founded in 1981, did develop its own political discourse, focused on the need for a "social practice" to overcome the division between Marxists and anarchists. Perhaps the most similar to a strategic positioning on the part of these groups was the manifesto published in 1976 in which the Grupo Anarquista Campesiño advocated the participation of its militants in two levels of struggle in the country, one economic, joining the remnants of vertical peasant unionism, in order to found a Galician peasant union with an anarcho-syndicalist orientation, and another cultural, with the formation of clubs and societies that would defend the Galician language and culture. However, it is not known whether these proposals, developed in the nationalist press of the time, had gone beyond the scope of discourse and ended up transforming into a strategy, let alone a program of intervention on Galician social reality.
Photo by Anna Turbau. Ortigueira, 1978 (Can be seen at the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid)
This was happening in a context of consolidation of the political transition to the Regime of 1978, in which the Moncloa Pacts and the Scala Case clipped the wings of a libertarian movement in upward dynamics. In Galicia, the cycle of social struggles and for the defense of the land that had reached its peak in 1977 - with conflicts such as the AP-9, As Encrobas, the Xove nuclear power plant or the Baldaio sandbank - was coming to an end. The Marxist parties (namely the Unión do Povo Galego and the Partido Socialista Galego) that had acted in these fronts of struggle in an organized manner, took advantage of these conflicts to increase their social base and to structure their organizations in the territory. An intervention that would unfortunately lead what came to be called the Galician national-popular movement to run aground in the electoral-institutional field.
A strategy of the anarchist organizations to participate in these fronts of struggle in an organized manner, and not as individuals, could perhaps have prevented all that social force from being channeled by the Marxist parties towards reformist objectives. But it is also the case that this lack of strategy would have left the young Galician anarchist organizations of the time at the mercy of the initiative of the parties, which would end up even setting their political agenda for them. Thus, both Arco da Vella and Zona Aberta would participate in 1982 in the process of establishing a unitary organization of Galician nationalism which, although initially formulated by some of its promoter groups as "a broad anti-authoritarian platform in which sovereignty should rest with the collectives", ended up being founded as a "unitary patriotic front", albeit without the participation of the two anarchist collectives. An interclass front that put the national question before the class struggle and that would soon be integrated into the Galician system of parties under the name of the Galician Nationalist Block (BNG).
But if in the 1980s the Galician anarchist collectives did not respond to the theoretical and strategic proposals that emanated from anarchist organizations from other nations in the Iberian territory, their focus on the national question did produce an effect, and a change of perspective in Galician anarchism with respect to the internationalist orthodoxy that the movement had had until then. For this new generation of militants, Galicia, and no longer the territory of the Spanish state, was the political frame of reference. This would have resonances in all subsequent anarchism, and up to the present day. Since then, there have been several attempts to articulate a Galician anarchist movement, with the Federación Irmandinha in the mid-1990s, Xuntanza Libertaria in 2000, or the Federación Anarquista Galega, which would be active between 2004 and 20062. There was even room for a novel experience insofar as it responded to the emergence of a new feeling in the social movements of Galicia, also crossed by the national question, such as the coordinating Loita Autônoma mediated in the 1990s, represented by groups from A Guarda, Vigo, Compostela, A Coruña and Ourense. However, in Galicia, a mass libertarian movement with the capacity to have a real impact on society was never reassembled. Once the transition was complete, anarchism was limited to the union, cultural sphere or to partial struggles such as anti-prison, insubordination or squatting, and its entire ambition consisted of federating or coordinating the libertarian groups that acted in these fields or specific groups that organized themselves autonomously.
Nowadays, there are many people in the country who identify with the tradition and principles of anarchism. However, we anarchists remain fragmented, participating in movements in defense of the land, in neighborhood associations, in social centers, in unions and in cultural associations without an organization or a strategy that links our actions and gives them a global orientation. However, if in recent decades and recent years we have been able to draw any conclusion from the social struggles that have taken place in the country, it is that, without strategic cohesion and a revolutionary horizon, social movements end up exhausting themselves in the impotence of mere welfareism, or by turning to reformist paths, if not authoritarian deviations.
In a context like the current one, in which the institutional left finds itself defeated and surrendered to the capitalist project, in which the depredation of nature and territory is pushing residents across the country to self-organize in platforms of struggle in defense of their towns and regions, in which speculative dynamics are expelling residents from their homes and neighborhoods, and in which the far right is gaining ground in institutions, in the media and on the streets. What can we do as anarchists?
To try to give a collective answer to this question that arose during the first edition of the Galician Libertarian Studies Seminar (2024), some anarchist militants have just founded Xesta, Galician Anarchist Organization, which held its first congress this March. A tool to overcome the current state of isolation of anarchists on the different fronts of struggle in the country, and with which to equip ourselves with a revolutionary theory and practice. It is about remaining present in neighborhood organizations, work centers, land defense groups, neighborhood associations and other popular institutions, but having in the specific anarchist organization a coordination space to feed these struggles, to help connect them with each other and to push them towards overcoming the capitalist system in a libertarian socialist sense.
If in the 80s the Galician libertarian movement was not able to protect the political independence of the working class in the face of the leadership of some Marxist parties that put the alliance with the national bourgeoisie before the proletarian question, perhaps it was because the specific anarchist organizations were more focused on the counterculture than on generating a revolutionary project in the country. If at that time the Marxist parties managed to divert the cycle of social mobilizations from the streets to bourgeois institutions, replacing direct action with delegation, perhaps it was due to a lack of coordination between the anarchists who participated in those mass movements as individuals and not in an organized way and with a strategic vision.
Perhaps we Galician anarchists have been participating individually, and not as a group, in the struggles of the Galician people for too long. Perhaps the specific Galician organizations have been far removed from the interests of the Galician people for too long. Perhaps it is time to make a movement similar to that carried out by the Galician anarchists at the end of the 1930s, and which gave them such good results, and to get involved again in the popular struggles in an organized way. Xesta was born with the intention of serving as a tool for this purpose.
Dani Palleiro, militant of Xesta Galician Anarchist Organization.
1Orrantia, Mikel (1978). For a libertarian and global alternative. Madrid: Zero Zyx.
2Cebrián Gorozarri, Brais (2024). A look at the recent past of libertarian coordination in Galicia. In Anarchism and Organization: Notes for the Galician Territory. Seminar on Galician Libertarian Studies.
3 https://regeneracionlibertaria.org/2025/11/21/estratexia-e-organizacion-na-historia-do-anarquismo-galego-1871-1936/
https://regeneracionlibertaria.org/2026/04/13/estratexia-e-organizacion-na-historia-do-anarquismo-galego-1975-2025/
_________________________________________
Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
Geen opmerkingen:
Een reactie posten