Being precedes consciousness. In other words, consciousness is an attribute of being. Without theorizing the historical experiences of the proletariat, there is neither revolutionary theory nor theoretical advancement. A lapse of time-longer or shorter-may exist between theory and practice, during which the weapon of criticism transforms into the criticism of weapons. When a revolutionary movement appears in history, it breaks with all dead theories, and the long-awaited hour of revolutionary action strikes; this action is worth more than any theoretical text, for it lays bare the movement's errors and inadequacies. That practical experience, lived collectively, shatters the useless barriers and clumsy limits established during long counter-revolutionary periods. Revolutionary theories prove their validity in the laboratory of history.
Table of Contents
Introduction
The Problem of the Program
The Vanguard and the Assessment
Notes for an Assessment of '36
I. The revolution could only accomplish that for which it had previously created the conditions of possibility
II. Historical experience crystallizes into new organizational forms
III. The development of the revolution itself reveals the limits of the forms attained
IV. The development of the revolution produced problems that had not previously existed in a real sense
V. The vanguard function is not always exercised by the same detachment
Praxis, Potentialities, and Limitations
Conclusions
Endnotes
Introduction
Revolution is a monumental task. It requires a collective effort capable of intervening in an extraordinarily complex and ever-changing reality. However, the forces of any revolutionary movement are always limited. Not everything can be done at once, nor does every intervention possess the same historical significance. An inevitable question then arises: How to determine the specific tasks that a given situation demands? Or, put another way, how to consciously guide revolutionary action?
This question has often received two equally inadequate answers. The first seeks answers in a pre-established doctrine, as if history consisted of implementing a previously discovered program. The second renounces all theoretical elaboration and trusts that practice itself will eventually find the way. One reduces politics to exegesis; the other, to spontaneity. Both separate what appears inseparable in history: the development of practical experience and the conscious elaboration of that same experience.
If revolution cannot be reduced to the application of a pre-existing truth, but neither can it be abandoned to the mere course of events, then we must frame the problem in other terms. The question ceases to be what the correct program is and becomes how a class historically produces the mediations that guide its own practice. It is precisely here that the assessment ceases to appear as a retrospective or scholarly exercise and reveals itself as a necessary moment in the development of the class struggle.
This article is merely an approach to this problem. It does not aim to offer a finished method or formulate a program for the present day. Its purpose is more modest: to propose some notions that allow us to understand the balance sheet as a constitutive moment of revolutionary praxis and, from there, to reframe the problem of the program as a mediation historically produced by the actual movement of the class itself.
In other words, we propose to provide some ideas to answer the question: How can a class produce true knowledge about its own historical practice and turn that knowledge into a force capable of transforming the material conditions that produce it?
The problem with the Program
Every revolutionary organization sooner or later faces a fundamental question: determining the specific tasks that a given situation demands. No collective practice can develop indefinitely through mere improvisation, but neither is simply repeating past experiences sufficient. Action involves selecting objectives, establishing priorities, formulating guidelines, and organizing efforts. Ultimately, all conscious practice presupposes some kind of program, whether implicit or explicit.
However, asserting this need immediately raises a deeper problem. What do we mean by a program? Is it a set of principles whose correctness exists independently of historical development and which we must discover and apply? Or, on the contrary, is the program a historical construct inseparable from the contradictory development of the class struggle itself?
The question before us is not merely terminological. Our answer will also determine how we understand revolutionary theory, the historical assessment, and political practice itself.
When a revolutionary organization asks itself what specific tasks it should undertake in a given situation, a prior problem inevitably arises: where do these tasks come from? How can one distinguish an orientation capable of advancing the class struggle from one condemned to reproduce the limitations of the previous cycle?
The most common response is to assume that the Program already exists as an established truth. Under this view, history is nothing more than the stage where a previously correct doctrine finally finds its proper application. The task of revolutionaries then consists of studying this doctrine, interpreting it correctly, and applying it with sufficient fidelity. Defeats are misinterpretations; victories, confirmations of a truth discovered beforehand. This way of understanding the Program transcends very different traditions. It matters little whether the sacred text is authored by Marx, Bakunin, Lenin, or Malatesta. The problem remains unchanged.
At the opposite extreme, we find a seemingly contradictory response, yet one that shares the same underlying premise. Where some reduce politics to the exegesis of the classics, others proclaim the self-sufficiency of immediate practice. It would suffice, they argue, to intervene in real conflicts for experience itself to spontaneously generate the necessary answers. Theory then appears as an intellectual luxury or, at best, as a subsequent systematization of what practice has already resolved on its own.
Both positions, however, run up against the same limitation. The first reduces history to a mere illustration of pre-existing truths. The second assumes that experience speaks for itself, forgetting that all practice is already mediated by historically produced categories, habits, and ideologies. No one acts upon a bare reality. Even the most immediate action presupposes a certain understanding of the world, however implicit it may remain.
In the second case, then, history is reduced to the will of individuals. In the first case, the role of history is reduced to the progressive realization of an idea: The Program.
Thus, the Program cannot exist prior to history, because history itself does not constitute the progressive realization of an idea. What Marx calls the real movement of the class does not designate the sum of workers' struggles, nor the activity of existing organizations, nor a fully constituted revolutionary subject. It designates the historical process by which the class itself, confronted with the objective contradictions of its conditions of existence, produces new forms of organization, consciousness, and practice that tend to negate those very conditions. The real movement is not what theory observes from the outside; it constitutes the very historical process of which theory is a part.
At this point, it is worth pausing to ask ourselves: if this movement exists by straining the inherent contradictions of capital, why doesn't it automatically produce revolution? The fact is, the objective contradictions of capital do not, in and of themselves, bring about their overcoming. Between the material conditions of a class's existence and its revolutionary transformation lie specific historical forms through which that class manages to consciously appropriate its own movement. We will call these forms mediations.
The problem, therefore, is not choosing between theory and practice. That opposition is completely unproductive. The issue is understanding how a class produces genuine knowledge about its own historical experience and how that knowledge can consciously reorganize its future practice.
Once forms have reached their limit, they cease to describe reality and no longer allow the movement to be projected toward higher forms. The need for balance then emerges, beginning where historical experience compels us to recognize this exhaustion. Put another way, a historical form expresses certain relationships and contradictions, allowing us to understand the concrete within the movement as a synthesis of multiple determinants. While these determinants can develop within it, the form constitutes an effective mediation between the class's experience and its capacity to represent itself ideally within the possibilities opened up by its own practice. But when the development of these contradictions exceeds the determinations contained within the form, it ceases to adequately express the reality that produced it and, at the same time, ceases to allow the ideal projection of its movement toward new forms. It is at this point that the need for balance emerges.
Therefore, the Balance Sheet is not an exercise in scholarship, nor a chronological compilation of victories and defeats, nor simply a retrospective critique of our actions. It constitutes the moment through which the historical experience of the class turns back upon itself and tests the categories with which it had hitherto understood its own practice.
Each cycle of struggle produces organizational forms, strategies, slogans, and worldviews. As long as these forms allow for the development of the movement, they appear adequate. But historical development itself eventually reveals their internal limitations. Certain categories cease to explain reality; certain organizational forms cease to respond to new conditions; certain strategies, which at one time propelled the movement, end up becoming obstacles to its further development.
Therefore, it is not merely a matter of pointing out errors. It consists, above all, in discerning which moments of truth the previous forms contained, what their historical limits were, and under what new determinations they can be preserved and transcended. This is why the Balance Sheet is an essentially dialectical process. It does not destroy the past to start from scratch, but neither does it make it an untouchable authority. It negates certain aspects of exhausted historical forms, while preserving what historical development itself has shown to be true.
Its result is not a repetition of the experience-it cannot be-but a reorganization of the categories through which the class understands its own existence. For every historical form exists within a specific set of relations, possibilities, and limits that do not stem from an abstract necessity, but from the concrete development achieved through the contradictions that constitute it. We will call historical determinations this objective set of conditions that make certain forms of practice possible and render others impossible. Historical determinations change because real movement transforms the conditions that gave them existence. Therefore, the assessment consists of recognizing when a particular historical configuration has exhausted the determinations from which it could continue to develop.
However, the Balance Sheet is not an end in itself. If it were, it would be claiming the end of history, since it would only describe limits without a class movement. Moreover, even if the Balance Sheet resolves renewed categories, what are these without a practice to embody them? If a class movement is necessary for a balance sheet to exist, what then guides that movement? If historical experience reorganizes our categories, it is because it immediately poses a new demand: to guide future practice. Put another way, the resulting categories need to be expressed to address this need; thus, the Program emerges, which should not be understood as a closed text or a fixed set of slogans. The Program reveals itself as the means by which a given historical experience is condensed into practical orientations capable of intervening in a specific conjuncture, transforming reality.
In other words, the Program constitutes the mediation between the accumulated experience of the class and the tasks that this same experience makes possible at a given historical moment. Precisely for this reason, the Program does not exist as a transhistorical truth. There exists only the historically determined elaboration of a revolutionary program suited to the concrete development of the class struggle.
Slogans change. Organizational forms change. Possible alliances change. Even the revolutionary tasks themselves are transformed as the historical form of capital transforms. What remains is not a fixed content, but the permanent need to produce that mediation between accumulated historical experience and the new conditions of the present. Thus, we can summarize that the Program is the historical form through which a class manages to consciously represent itself in the objective movement of its own emancipation.
However, this raises a question: If the path to be followed by the objective movement is not given, how can a class represent itself within it? In other words, if the class is moving toward a place, but the path doesn't exist before it begins walking, how can our class recognize itself on this path? The point here is that the Program contains that path in potential . While it remains only as an ideal representation of the necessary tasks, it is still an objective possibility, but not yet a material force. Every revolutionary aim demands to be embodied in organizational forms capable of effectively intervening in reality. And it is precisely at this point that Praxis appears.
Praxis is often identified with any form of conscious activity or simply with political activism. But such an identification is entirely insufficient. The manager who organizes production, the official who administers the state, or the worker subjected to the discipline of capital also engage in conscious activity. However, none of these activities constitutes revolutionary praxis.
Praxis begins when the Program ceases to exist merely as a representation and becomes tangible through collective activity capable of effectively transforming the material conditions of existence. Only that praxis which lays the groundwork for negating the material conditions that make the existence of the proletariat necessary is revolutionary praxis. It is not simply acting. It is acting on the basis of historically developed experience. It is continually reorganizing one's own categories as reality reveals new contradictions. It is producing new organizational forms where previous ones prove insufficient. And it is, finally, converting that new knowledge into material power through the class's conscious intervention in its own historical development.
Balance, Program, and Praxis do not, therefore, designate three independent moments. They constitute a single movement. Praxis is conscious historical experience. Balance is the experience of conceptually reorganizing that experience. And the Program, being and only existing in movement, condenses its fundamental determinations and guides a new Praxis. The relationship between them is neither linear nor successive in time; they are dialectical moments that exist simultaneously and only in movement.
Each new cycle reproduces that movement on different historical bases, elevating the accumulated experience of the class to higher forms of self-knowledge and transformation of reality.
The assessment, therefore, is not limited to noting limitations: it shows how, in its unfolding, a historical form produces the conditions for its own exhaustion and thereby opens up new demands for future practice. It is on this basis-and only on this basis-that the question of the subject who realizes, condenses, and returns to the class those determinations opened up by the real movement itself can be raised.
The Vanguard and the Balance
At this point, it is urgent to ask: if the assessment only acquires meaning when it reorganizes historical experience and transforms it into a new practical orientation, who carries this out? Who condenses the discovered determinations into a program? Who returns them to praxis in a form capable of developing them? 2
If the program only exists in motion, and if that motion only becomes conscious through assessment, then there must be a concrete historical form in which that consciousness is objectified, organized, and becomes material force. We will call this function the vanguard. The vanguard, therefore, designates the historical function through which certain detachments crystallize the assessment of a collective experience, reorganizing inherited categories, making visible new determinations of the real movement of the class, and transforming them into orientations capable of opening a new cycle of praxis. 3
To the question, "Who is the vanguard?" the usual answers oscillate between two equally inadequate poles. Some identify the vanguard with a subject separate from the class, invested with a truth that it subsequently transmits to the workers' movement, as if consciousness could be instilled from the outside. Others, in reaction, dissolve any specific function into an abstract appeal to "the masses," assuming that the program will emerge spontaneously from the very course of the struggle. Both positions, however, share the same premise: they consider the vanguard as a pre-existing subject. They disagree only about who occupies that position.
But the path taken so far leads to a different conclusion. If the program does not pre-exist praxis, neither can the subject responsible for carrying it out. Just as the program constitutes a historically produced mediation, so too does the avant-garde constitute a historically produced form.
Reframing the question "Who is the vanguard?" as "What does it mean to exercise a vanguard function?" shifts the focus from identity to the historical conditions that make such a function possible. The question ceases to be who occupies that position and becomes, under what historical circumstances, that function can be objectified within the actual movement of the class. Exercising a vanguard function consists of being able to assess a historical experience, reorganize the categories through which that experience was understood, and, on that basis, open up new practical possibilities, not only potentially, but actually.
Therefore, the assessment does not consist of abandoning the previous categories, but rather in demonstrating the historical limits of their validity, preserving the moment of truth they contain, and reorganizing them into a higher form capable of understanding the new determinations of the historical moment. For this reason, the subject who performs this function is neither given a priori nor constructed in the abstract to respond to the assessment. It is realized insofar as it contributes to making conscious and organizing objective possibilities opened up by the very development of the class struggle, returning them to the struggle in the form of new practical mediations.
In other words, the constitution of the vanguard happens in concrete analysis, in practical connection with the class to demonstrate, in action , the validity of the new categories when it comes to understanding the world and transforming it .
Thus, the avant-garde cannot be understood as a fixed essence or a permanent identity. It is a function that exists only in motion and, therefore, under historically determined forms. The group that embodies this function today need not be the same one that exercises it tomorrow, nor can it claim to do so under the same program eternally. What defines the avant-garde is not its permanence, but its capacity to consciously express already mature determinations and contribute to their further development.
This function, moreover, cannot be conceived in terms of a rigid opposition between subject and object. The vanguard emerges from the class and, by consciously objectifying in practice the determinations that the class produces, it also transforms the class itself and is transformed with it. In turn, it needs the class as the material subject of praxis: without this social base, without this organized mass, no program can be anything more than mere representation. The vanguard is, therefore, both subject and object of the class's transformation process, but only insofar as it forms part of a contradiction that continually produces and transcends it. In other words, formulating the vanguard as a differentiated aspect presupposes its negation, that which is not the vanguard but is part of the class. In this sense, the existence of a vanguard requires another pole, which we will call the masses. The attempt to separate the vanguard from the masses, even if only to separate it in order to then intervene upon them, destroys any material basis for its existence.
A different interpretation of a historical thesis formulated by Agustín Guillamón can be considered here: in 1936, there was no detachment capable of acting as a vanguard, formulating practical guidelines aimed at destroying the State and organizing the working class into its own organs of power; in 1937, the Friends of Durruti partially formulated these guidelines, but without a sufficient base to implement them. If we provisionally accept this diagnosis, an immediate conclusion seems to follow: to avoid repeating that failure, our present task would consist of building the vanguard that was lacking then, so that, when a new revolutionary moment arrives, it can play a strategic role and organize the proletariat into its organs of power.
However, this conclusion introduces a determination that historical development itself cannot establish beforehand. If the vanguard is a function that emerges from the actual movement of the class, it cannot be constituted beforehand as a subject destined to exercise it. We do not know which detachment will exercise that function until the development of the struggle allows us to determine it. The Friends of Durruti were not the vanguard because they had been previously constituted as such, but rather insofar as, under specific historical conditions, they were able to condense certain contradictions of the revolutionary experience, formulate them consciously, and transform them into practical guidelines. That this function could be exercised in a limited, contradictory, or ultimately defeated way does not invalidate this determination; on the contrary, it is part of the very object of the assessment.
The difference between building the vanguard and building the conditions of possibility for a vanguard function to emerge is therefore not merely terminological. The first formulation presupposes that we can determine in advance the subject, the organizational form, and the tasks that will correspond to the vanguard before the historical movement has produced the conditions that allow us to determine them. The second shifts the question to the development of the class's concrete capacities: its forms of organization, its organs of deliberation and coordination, its theoretical capacities, its cadres, its experiences of struggle, and the mediations that allow it to transform particular experiences into collective knowledge. Only in the development of these relationships can a detachment capable of exercising a vanguard function crystallize; and only historical practice itself will allow us to determine whether it has actually exercised it.
From this follows an immediate consequence for the present tasks. If the vanguard does not constitute a subject that can be constructed in the abstract, neither can we deduce our political priorities from a predetermined image of what that vanguard should be. The tasks must emerge from existing material conditions, from the contradictions that currently permeate our class movement, and from the potentialities contained within those conditions. It is not, therefore, a matter of first constructing the vanguard and then relating it to the class, but rather of developing the means by which the class can expand its capacities for organization, knowledge, and action, making it possible for certain detachments to assume a vanguard role.
In this sense, the problem of the avant-garde necessarily leads back to assessment, program, and praxis. Assessment allows us to determine which capacities were historically produced, which reached their limits, and what new determinations emerged from their development. The program condenses these determinations into guidelines for action. And praxis sets these guidelines in motion again, transforming the conditions that made them possible and producing new experiences upon which to conduct a new assessment. The avant-garde is not situated outside this movement: it is one of the historical forms through which this movement becomes aware of its own possibilities and transforms them into material force.
Thus, the assessment is presented as an exercise that distills concrete answers from the abstract historical narrative to the following questions: What material conditions did the revolutionary movement produce that, when the moment of insurrection arrived, served as the basis for its development? Conversely, what developments, or lack thereof, limited the revolution's development, both in its scope and depth? Likewise, what potentialities failed to materialize, despite having the material basis for them, and why? Perhaps even more importantly, what forms of struggle, institutions, and traditions were crystallizations of class consciousness that, when an organic crisis arose, provided the basis for the possibility of an insurrection? 4
Notes for the Balance Sheet of 1936
If we understand the balance as the elaboration of the historical experience through which we distinguish the conditions that enabled a certain development from those that limited its unfolding, then it is possible to formulate, even provisionally, some hypotheses about the revolution that began in July 1936.
This is not about conducting an exhaustive study or drawing universal lessons. Much less about retrospectively reconstructing a supposedly correct program that, had it been implemented, would have guaranteed revolutionary triumph. Precisely because history does not constitute the necessary unfolding of a pre-existing truth, the assessment can only identify potentialities that were actually developed, concrete historical limitations, and open possibilities that were thwarted by the very course of the class struggle.
From this perspective, I propose to point out five elements whose consideration can serve as a starting point for an assessment of the Spanish revolution and a current program.
I. The revolution could only accomplish that for which it had previously produced the conditions of its possibility
One of the most striking events of July 1936 was the speed with which large sectors of production passed into the hands of the working class. Within days, forms of worker management emerged, encompassing everything from small workshops to large industries, transportation networks, and public services. However, this phenomenon is often presented as an immediate consequence of the defeat of the military coup, when, in reality, it constitutes the visible result of a much longer process.
The spread of libertarian pedagogy, the daily practice of direct action, the consolidation of a federal organizational culture, direct action struggles, assembly-based decision-making, and the development of industrial federations had, over decades, produced social capacities that the revolution itself was able to mobilize. The development of studies on production processes, the experiments in industrial coordination, and the prior experiences of self-management were not mere propaganda exercises; they constituted a historical accumulation of practical knowledge without which it would have been virtually impossible to organize production once the state apparatus had collapsed.
The assessment therefore compels us to shift our focus from the revolutionary event to the historical conditions that made its development possible. In the words of our comrade Genís, "July 19, 1936 cannot be explained without speaking, as Guillamón says at the beginning of his lecture, of the previous 70 years. And the fact is, we rarely stop to talk about the issue." 5 The revolution did not create the capacity to organize production from nothing; it brought into effect a potentiality that previous practice had been slowly building up .
II. Historical experience crystallizes into new organizational forms
The skills developed by a class do not remain as abstract knowledge. They become embodied in institutions, habits, organizational methods, and forms of intervention capable of condensing the experience accumulated during a given historical cycle .
The evolution of the defense committees is a prime example of this process. Born in a context still marked by the strategy of revolutionary gymnastics, their transformation after October 1934 reflects a genuine process of practical reassessment. The failure of previous insurrections forced the abandonment of spontaneous approaches and led to much more systematic forms of preparation, terrain analysis, logistical planning, and clandestine organization.
The concrete assessment of this experience is very well illustrated by the report of the National Committee of Defense Committees, presented in 1934, in the heat of the ongoing Asturian insurrection:
There is no revolution without preparation; and the more intense and intelligent the preparation, the better the revolution will prevail. We must put an end to the prejudice of improvisation, driven by exalted inspiration, as the only possible course of action in times of difficulty. This error, this reliance on the creative instinct of the masses, has cost us dearly. The indispensable means of war for combating a state with experience, strong resources, and superior offensive and defensive capabilities are not procured as if by spontaneous generation .
When the military coup occurred in July 1936, these committees did not improvise their response. The possibility of defeating the army in Barcelona was not solely the result of popular heroism, but also of a previously developed organizational experience, materialized in concrete forms of revolutionary preparation . In this sense, the committees constitute an example of how historical practice, when evaluated, generates new material capacities for future action.
III. The very development of the revolution reveals the limits of the forms achieved
However, every historical form contains limits that only become visible when it reaches the maximum development permitted by its own constraints. Precisely because the revolution managed to deploy the capacities built during the previous cycle to an extraordinary degree, it was also able to reveal what those capacities could no longer resolve.
The fall of Zaragoza, Cádiz, and Seville should not be understood solely as a series of military defeats. Each one revealed structural deficiencies in the organizational structures achieved up to that point. Revolutionary preparations had reached a high level of development in numerous local areas, but the very scale of the war demanded higher forms of regional, confederal, and even international coordination.
The case of Seville is particularly illustrative. On July 18, the fascists quickly seized key points in the city. However, in working-class neighborhoods like La Macarena, San Julián, and Triana, popular resistance was intense. Workers and CNT militants, along with other popular sectors, erected barricades and engaged in fierce street fighting for days against the rebel troops. However, these positions had little light weaponry, scarce ammunition, and little capacity to respond to the systematic use of artillery and professional troops. Thus, on July 21, Triana fell, and between the 22nd and 23rd, the organized workers' resistance in La Macarena, San Luis, and San Julián succumbed .
The problem lay not only in the courage of those defending the barricades, but also in the fact that this resistance remained virtually isolated. Once the fighting began, the resistance lacked a regional structure capable of concentrating resources, effectively coordinating the various fronts, and transforming them into a unified military response.
The contrast with Barcelona is significant. There, the Defense Committees did not emerge spontaneously on July 19th. After the failure of previous uprisings, and especially after October 1934, they had abandoned the logic of revolutionary posturing in favor of much more systematic preparation: reconnaissance of the terrain, acquisition of weapons, development of plans, organization by neighborhood, study of strategic objectives, and coordination among numerous militant groups. This preparation allowed them to respond in a relatively unified manner to the military coup and, above all, to transform the army's defeat into the starting point of a revolutionary process.
However, even this experience quickly revealed its own limitations. The Defense Committees constituted an extraordinary form of organization for urban insurrection, but their implementation was profoundly uneven across the territory. Where they had not achieved such development-as in much of western Aragon, Andalusia, or Galicia-the revolutionary movement found itself deprived of a tool whose construction required years of organizational accumulation. Added to this was an even deeper limitation: the effective incapacity of the confederal mechanisms to stably coordinate this experience beyond the local or regional level . The uneven development of the Committees could not be compensated for by common planning on a peninsular scale.
It is no coincidence that, during the war itself, attempts began to emerge to respond to this new situation through unprecedented bodies, such as the so-called Committee of Committees or, later, the CNT's Political Advisory Commission . Regardless of the merits of their specific solutions, their mere appearance reveals something more important: it was the revolution itself that transformed latent contradictions into effective organizational problems. The inherited forms could no longer resolve them on their own, and history demanded new categories for understanding them. It is precisely for this reason that we can now critically discuss the scope and limitations of those responses.
It is not, therefore, a matter of retrospectively asserting that "there was a lack of coordination." Such a formulation reduces the assessment to a mere enumeration of shortcomings. The crucial point is to understand that it was the very development of the revolution that brought this need to the forefront as a new historical imperative. While revolutionary preparations had to respond to localized conflicts, the existing organizational structures proved remarkably effective. But when the confrontation acquired territorial dimensions and the revolution began to grapple with problems of political leadership, logistics, and economic coordination of general scope, those same structures revealed the historical limits of their own development. The contradiction was not external to them; it arose from their very success.
Contradictions thus appear not as accidental errors, but as the point at which a historical form exhausts its possibilities for development and makes visible the need for a higher form.
IV. The development of the revolution produced problems that did not effectively exist before.
Perhaps the most important lesson of the revolutionary process is that its biggest problems stemmed not only from what it inherited, but also from what it itself produced.
The partial defeat of the state apparatus and the emergence of revolutionary bodies opened up a completely new situation. The problem was no longer solely how to destroy the old power; it also became how to organize the new power born from the revolution itself. The formation of the Central Committee of Anti-Fascist Militias precisely expresses this new contradiction. Similarly, the policy of anti-fascist collaboration, the debates on government participation, and the events of May 1937 can only be understood as responses, whether successful or not, to a historical problem that, before July 1936, simply did not exist in any tangible form.
It is here that the balance sheet reveals its full power. The revolution did not fail because a previously correct program was neglected, but because its own development produced historical tasks for which the workers' movement had not yet developed the corresponding theoretical, organizational, and political frameworks. Questions of revolutionary power, class alliances, and the articulation of a program for the entire proletariat did not appear as doctrinal problems, but as demands posed by the revolution's unfolding. Nor was its outcome merely mechanical; the revolutionary course itself provided concrete answers to these problems. Was the CNT destined to follow this path? No, not necessarily; only now, in retrospect, can we judge it as a mistake because it followed a course of material development within history .
V. The vanguard role is not always performed by the same detachment
The question of revolutionary power allows us to observe with particular clarity how a historical determination can reappear in different forms as the class experience reorganizes its own categories. After the military defeat of the uprising in Barcelona, García Oliver supported, at the Plenum of Local and Regional Committees on July 21, the proposal put forward by José Xena, representing the Baix Llobregat regional committee, to advance the revolution in order to implement libertarian communism, known as the "go for it all" proposal.10 The proposal was defeated by a large majority, and the CNT opted to participate in the Central Committee of Antifascist Militias, a class collaboration body. It is not our interest here to retrospectively determine whether that decision was right or wrong in the abstract, but rather to observe what historical possibility each position expressed and what happened to it in the subsequent development of the revolution.
Antifascist collaboration gradually transformed the CCMA into the fundamental political mediator of the Catalan revolution, but it did not resolve the contradiction that had emerged on July 19th. The working class had partially dismantled the existing power structure and built its own organs of organization, production, and defense, without constituting a political form capable of unifying and developing that class power. The issue that had arisen in July did not disappear; it was displaced and reappeared, under different conditions, as the contradictions of class collaboration became increasingly evident.
By the end of April 1937, the Friends of Durruti had already formulated the slogans of "Revolutionary Junta" and "All power to the working class." During the May Days, these slogans took on practical meaning, contributing to the revitalization of the revolutionary struggle on the barricades. Later, in August, the Friend of the People reiterated the need for this Junta and the reasons for its formation. The specific form of the Junta proposal was not identical to the formulation of July 1936: it was the result of a different historical experience and subsequent theoretical development. Moreover, throughout 1937, it was updated as history unfolded . However, both positions can be interpreted in light of the same underlying principle: the need to provide the revolution with its own political form, independent of class, capable of organizing and materially exercising the power arising from the workers' struggle. The difference, therefore, does not lie in the emergence of a completely new truth, but in the transformation of a determination that previous experience had left unresolved.
It is precisely here that the historically determined nature of the vanguard function becomes apparent. Whoever expresses a revolutionary possibility is not thereby invested with a permanent vanguard status. García Oliver was able to express in July a possibility opened up by the development of the insurrection and yet later participate in political mediation that contributed to containing it. The Friends of Durruti, for their part, formulated a response months later that revisited the problem of revolutionary power under new conditions. The vanguard function, therefore, does not reside in the permanent identity of a detachment nor in the constitution of one specifically to be a vanguard, but rather in its concrete capacity to recognize the determinations produced by the real movement, raise them to consciousness, and return them to the movement in a practical form capable of developing them.
Practice, Potentialities and Limitations
Perhaps more important is understanding these elements as historical potentialities , not as necessary developments . That is to say, the presence of these elements does not automatically determine a specific course of revolution, as many other factors are at play, and we cannot ignore the subjectivity of the moment. Nevertheless, these elements constitute a condition of possibility for the triumph of the revolution. Therein lies their great value.
Far from offering definitive answers, an exercise like this allows us to understand the nature of our own assessment. It doesn't consist of reconstructing an ideal past or pointing out, from the comfort of the present, what others should have done. Its task is different: to identify the historical potential that was actually developed, the organizational forms that crystallized that experience, the contradictions that revealed its limitations, and the new tasks that emerged from that same process.
The potential we have outlined did not materialize through mere inertia, nor could their resolution have arisen from an isolated will. Precisely because the revolution produced problems that had not previously existed in practice, the inherited organizational structures demonstrated their capacity in one area and their inadequacy in another. Where accumulated experience had allowed the insurrection to be sustained, that same experience also revealed that the new level reached by the struggle demanded new forms of mediation, capable of reorganizing what had previously been scattered.
Precisely for this reason, these elements must be understood as conditions of possibility and not as guarantees of any historical outcome. None of them contained within itself the triumph of the revolution, just as their absence does not mechanically determine defeat. Rather, they constitute the objective terrain upon which historical praxis produces new possibilities, new contradictions, and, with them, new tasks for the revolutionary movement.
If the assessment constitutes the conscious elaboration of our class's historical experience, its function cannot be limited to the description of the past. The critique of past practices only acquires meaning when it reorganizes present practices. Otherwise, the assessment would be reduced to a historiographical exercise incapable of intervening in the actual movement.
The potentialities and limitations we have outlined are therefore not a collection of abstract lessons or a catalog of successes and failures. They express historical problems whose resolution remains open. Precisely because the form that capital takes is constantly transforming, the ways in which the working class organizes its resistance and builds its revolutionary capacity must also be transformed. An assessment only fulfills its purpose when it allows us to formulate new tasks in accordance with these historical realities.
The first of these concerns the very formulation of the program. If the Spanish Revolution highlighted the need to address problems related to revolutionary power, class alliances, and political coordination, the current task cannot consist of mechanically repeating the answers formulated then, but rather of reconstructing the spaces capable of producing them anew under present conditions. This requires developing organizations, working methods, and forums for discussion where different political lines can be confronted, tested in practice, and collectively refined. There is no other path to the development of revolutionary theory than the ongoing critique of historical experience itself. Social practice remains the sole criterion of truth.
But the program cannot be developed in isolation from the concrete forms of class organization. If revolutionary capacities are always the result of a prior historical process, then one of the fundamental tasks is to discover, through praxis itself, those forms of self-organization that allow us to develop today the capacities that will demand deeper revolutionary processes tomorrow. It is not simply a matter of organizing immediate conflicts, but of doing so in such a way that these conflicts produce new collective capacities: higher forms of solidarity, knowledge about the organization of production, experience in self-management, territorial coordination, and habits of collective decision-making.
The organizational forms we adopt today are not politically inconsequential. They constitute the terrain on which the historical capacities of our class are developed-or limited. Just as decades of libertarian organization made possible the rapid socialization of production in July 1936, the forms we build today will condition the possibilities opened up by future eruptions of the class struggle. Organization thus ceases to be a mere instrument and becomes a constitutive moment in the very historical development of the proletariat.
This reflection takes on even greater importance under the conditions of contemporary capitalism. The internationalization of production chains, the integration of markets, and the global nature of capital render any strategy confined to the strictly local or national sphere insufficient. Just as capital organizes its reproduction internationally, the working class can only fully develop its own capacities through effective forms of regional, confederal, and international coordination. The only possible counter to imperialist capitalism is an equally genuine class internationalism, capable of translating into common organization, solidarity, and action.
However, it would be contradictory to conclude this article by offering a closed set of guidelines. Precisely because the program constitutes a historically produced mediation, its development cannot be deduced from a text nor resolved through doctrinal formulations. It is up to the concrete analysis of the current situation, the debate among the various factions of the labor movement, and, above all, social practice itself, to determine the specific forms that these tasks must take. If this work seeks to defend anything, it is precisely that this elaboration constitutes a collective and historically open task.
Conclusions
The assessment and development of the program require collaborative work. The various currents and factions are particular condensations of our class's experience. Sectarianism isolates us; assessment compels us to compare our practice with that of the entire class, learning from both minorities and majorities.
To quote Augustine one last time:
Without revolutionary theory there is no revolution. Without a theorization of the historical experiences of the proletariat there is no revolutionary theory, nor any theoretical progress.[...]. Revolutionary Marxism is a method of analyzing social and historical reality, which transforms the weapon of critique into the critique of weapons.[...]. The party of the proletariat is not only a program, but also its defense by individuals driven by revolutionary passion, and organized in various parties, nebulous groups, and class vanguards, which advocate different tactics. 12
Our task now is to examine the concrete application of these guidelines. That is, to determine the specific forms they can take, according to the current form of capital in a given geographical area. This task entails collective debate among the detachments, analysis of the current situation, and, above all, the practical and creative application of new organizational forms that preserve the strengths of existing forms while simultaneously negating and overcoming their limitations. It is important to emphasize that progress can only occur through concrete guidelines capable of addressing existing contradictions and opening new possibilities for the class movement. The criterion, therefore, cannot be the reproduction of a specific organizational form, but rather its capacity to develop, under concrete historical conditions, greater degrees of self-organization and generalized class independence .
Finally, I would like to take this opportunity to reiterate my appeal. An appeal for the socialization of theory and cooperation in practice, for the sake of balance and the advancement of the class struggle. These tasks, I believe, are not the exclusive domain of platformism; they call upon every militant who fights for emancipation. This is not a call for abstract unity to resolve them. Not at all. Far from this notion of setting aside our differences, we must find unity in the concrete, which necessarily implies a degree of separation for the development of conscious practice.
T. Morago, Liza militant
https://regeneracionlibertaria.org/2026/10/09/apuntes-para-el-balance
_________________________________________
Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
Geen opmerkingen:
Een reactie posten