Detailed critique of Agustín Guillamón’s “Eleven Class Theses on the Revolution and Counterrevolution in Catalonia (1936-1938). For an anarchist theory.”

“They redouble their applause …
the Tyrians and the Trojans follow them.”
(Virgil. Aeneid I, 747)

By Aníbal

For Guillamón’s “Eleven class theses on the revolution and counterrevolution in Catalonia (1936-1938)” plus a first critique (all in spanish), see Inter-rev Foro.

Preliminary note

I make a thesis-by-thesis critique.
It should be understood that what I do not criticize is because it seems adequate to me or because it could simply only be questioned in some non-fundamental aspect.

Thesis 1)

He attributes Franco’s nationalist side to “the bourgeoisie,” which is not true because the defending side of the Popular Front was also bourgeois, liberal republican, and left-wing in general, together with the nationalist bourgeoisie of Euskadi, Catalonia, and Galicia.

He says that:

“there was A CENTRAL OR STATE POWER VACUUM. Neither the Republican State nor the autonomous regional governments (such as the Generalitat) exercised central power, but neither did these local committees”.

Although the central or state republican power sometimes appeared semi-hidden and divided by factions in frequent brawls, it was in the hands of the corresponding capitalist representatives. The right-wing disputed it, conspiring legally and illegally to expel the Popular Front from the levels of state power it had achieved and hindered its management as best it could. When the rebel troops occupied parts of Spanish territory, there were state authorities in each zone, but in a clear context of war and administrative-judicial and political dislocation.

The thesis exaggerates the appearance of powers that claimed to be workers and revolutionaries but mostly showed to be on the side of the republican bourgeois state at central, autonomous, and local levels. For example, the presence of the CNT in 4 Ministries or that of the POUM in Catalonia with positions in the Generalitat (Andreu Nin, as Minister of Justice, went so far as to say that the proletarian dictatorship already existed) did not mean the creation of a proletarian dictatorship, did not mean the creation of a double power (as the FOR of Munis and Co. considered, together with Trotsky and his supporters), nor the destructuring and destruction of the structures of the bourgeois state. Still, on the contrary, it was proved that the access of members of CNT and POUM to some of those structures played an efficient role in the left bourgeois, channeling the existing uneasiness and hatred in proletarian sectors against exploitation and bourgeois rule. It was a weapon in favor of left-wing capital to fight against right-wing capital, with the tactic of democratic anti-fascism and the strategy they defined as one of industrial and social modernization, that is, the maintenance of capitalist relations and structures.

Thesis 2)

Guillamón says: “The revolutionary committees: defense, factory, neighborhood, workers’ control, in the neighborhoods, defense, supply, etc., are the embryo of the organs of power of the working class. They initiated a systematic expropriation of the property of the bourgeoisie, set in motion the industrial and peasant collectivization, organized the popular militias that defined the military fronts of the early days, organized the control patrols that imposed the new ‘revolutionary order’ through the violent repression of the Church, the bosses, the fascists, and the former free trade unionists and riflemen. But they could not coordinate and create a centralized workers’ power”.

Such initiation of this systematic expropriation is exaggerated, given that they were limited experiences carried out in a series of restricted zones. Guillamón neglects the general Spanish scope. In another book by Guillamón, on the group Los Amigos de Durruti, he defends the following:

“the social movement of revolutionary anarchism, organized in revolutionary committees of a neighborhood, local, workers’ control, defense, supplies, etc., constituted the embryos of a workers’ power that reached heights of economic management, popular revolutionary initiatives and proletarian autonomy, which even today illuminate and announce a future radically different from capitalist barbarism, fascist horror or Stalinist slavery.”

But a little further on, speaking of “the theoretical points that allow us to understand and unveil the nature of the historical process initiated (above all in Catalonia) in July ’36”, Guillamón defends that :

• “In Spain, in August 1936, there was no longer a revolution, there was only room for war. An exclusively military war, with no revolutionary character of any kind”.
• “The collectivizations and socializations on the economic plane are nothing when the state power is in the hands of the bourgeoisie.”

The contradictions are evident. Guillamón says that high levels of the revolution were reached. Then he says that the bourgeois war took over the terrain “on August 36” (true) and that those collectivizations and socializations with the state power in bourgeois hands “are nothing” (true, again). The disorder and erratic trajectory of his analysis are manifest. He goes from the typical exaggeration that is so much practiced in petty-bourgeois anarchist circles to exposing what was going on with tight, descriptive, and critical precision. So where do we end up? Guillamón’s speech provides nourishment to Tyrians and Trojans opportunely and opportunistically. They abound if one looks for historical data, but if one looks for clarity, it is not.

Spain was in this condition:

“On September 26, 1936, anarchists and poumists entered the government of the Generalidad de Cataluña: Nin for the POUM and Doménech, Fábregas and García Birlán, for the CNT. On October 2, the CCMA (Central Committee of the Anti-Fascist Militia) was dissolved. On October 12, a Decree of the Generalidad was published ordering the dissolution of the Local Committees (of a revolutionary character), which were to be replaced, in a short time, by new town councils of a popular-front character” (Guillamón, Agustín. Los Amigos de Durruti. Texts and Documents)

As for such “collectivization,” it did not imply doing away with the Generalidat but instead seizing companies and managing sectors that the Republican anti-fascist society needed to achieve its ends, bourgeois ends. The bourgeoisie of those companies went into hiding and then retook control or was temporarily accepted as a consultative part. In many Spanish areas, everything went on “as usual,” in some cases, the trade unions got involved in co-management formulas. The employers’ breaches of agreements and measures based on the management of mixed Judgments were the order of the day. Many strikes and trade union actions aimed to try to mend the situation, create jobs, and get the business and state reprisals to give way or be softened.

On the other hand, the “popular militias that defined the military fronts of the early days” were interclassist, not classist. They were not a germ of a proletarian army or of proletarian anti-capitalist power. The attempts to create revolutionary militias were limited, and both CNT, POUM and other parties and unions of the bourgeois left annulled them or drifted towards anti-fascist activities, as in the case of Durruti’s militiamen.

Guillamón says that they did not create a centralized workers’ power, and that is so, but that is because they did not consider it in general, especially in the libertarian ranks, where decentralized and federalist ideas and practices were something sanctified as the quintessence of the desirable. The dispersion in the CNT ranks sometimes reached such a point that they could not coordinate the industrial, commercial, or agricultural strikes they called. It is not only a question of lack of resources, as they say in the CNT, but of an approach that idealizes decentralization, in the federalist Bakuninist vein, typical reproduction of the conditions in which the proletariat lives as a class for capital, therefore lacking its autonomy, and the petty bourgeoisie, with its autonomous businesses and establishments competing among themselves and with state pressure, from the middle bourgeoisie and big capital above, pressuring. Again, we read another book by Guillamón (Los Amigos de Durruti …):

“Without the total and immediate destruction of the capitalist state, the revolutionary days of July 36 could not give way to a new structure of workers’ power.”

This is correct and evident. But what does Guillamón understand by such destruction? We read in that book:

“Destruction (of the State) which is not produced by decree, but by the immediate daily performance of all its functions by the committees (or the organisms created by the proletariat for that purpose.”

This is the typical approach of anarchism, with its corresponding idealistic and mystifying dose, for eradicating the bourgeois State means not assuming its functions in any other way. On the other hand, would it be the CNT who would take those functions? In that case, we would have anarcho-syndicalist state capitalism, as the GIC rightly affirmed:

“In April 1931, the development of the relations of production in Spain meant a turn in the relations of power in the direction of a bourgeois revolution.

In this revolution, the proletariat was organized mainly in the CNT. The class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie gradually intensified after the republic’s founding. The CNT, which appears in this struggle as the leader of the proletariat, is a trade union fighting for the conquest of power by the CNT. This must necessarily lead to a dictatorship over the proletariat by the CNT leadership (state capitalism).

The appearance of the CNT before and after the founding of the republic was one of support for the bourgeoisie, sparing and propping up the State and weakening the proletariat’s economic and proletarian action.

The anarchist opposition is a fraudulent illusion because, as a trade union, it ignores the essence of the union. Its aspirations can only lead to the impulse of the proletariat being executed in sterile manifestations.

The anarcho-syndicalist movement leads, like the Bolshevik movement, to state capitalism.

The only way to destroy capitalism is to eliminate the class rule of the bourgeoisie and its State by establishing the proletarian dictatorship, that is, the rule of the proletariat as a class through its class organizations, the councils, and factory organizations.”

(GIC, “The role of the CNT (National Confederation of Labor, anarcho-syndicalist union) in the Spanish revolution” (1931). Ch.V. Summary : https://inter-rev.foroactivo.com/t11521-gic-el-papel-de-la-cnt-confederacion-nacional-del-trabajo-sindicato-anarcosindicalista-en-la-revolucion-espanola-1931?highlight=Confederacion)

When the president of the Generalitat, Companys, meets for the second time with the CNT, the latter claims the enterprises and tells him that they do not want to know anything about politics, so the sector of the bourgeoisie in charge of it remains in place. Ahem! This was the “energy” of the CNT. We read:

“Companys proposed to the anarcho-syndicalist leaders the creation of a new organism, composed of representatives of all the left and trade union political forces, which would be in charge of confronting the fascist threat. This body was to be called the Central Committee of Antifascist Militias. Companys’ first objective was to reorganize the armed forces through this new organism, and he gave this purpose to the Militia Committee, which he proposed to all the political and trade union forces in the hope that the anarchists, essentially militant men, would be integrated into it and would disengage themselves from political questions”.

(Ramon Brusco, Les milicies antifeixistes i l’exèrcit popular a Catalunya, Edicions el Jonc, 2003, vol I, page 28 ISBN 84-932034-2-4)

Guillamón collects the following:

“García Oliver:

That is why when Companys called us, he said, “I know you have many reasons for complaint and grievance with me. I have fought you a lot, and I have not been able to appreciate you for what you are worth. However, a sincere rectification is never too late. Mine, which I am going to make now, has the value of a confession: if I had appreciated you for what you are worth, possibly the circumstances now would be different, but there is no remedy; you alone have defeated the military rebels, and logically, you should govern. If you think so, I will gladly hand over the presidency of the Generalidat to you, and if you think I can help in any other place, you only have to tell me the position I should occupy. But if, because we still do not know who has triumphed in other parts of Spain, you think that from the Presidency of the Generalidat, I can still be useful in holding the legal representation of Catalonia, tell me that from there and always in agreement with you, we will continue the fight until it is clear who the victors are”. For our part, and this was the opinion of the CNT-FAI, we understood that Companys should continue at the head of the Generalidat precisely because we had not taken to the streets to fight concretely for the social revolution but to defend ourselves from the fascist militarism.”

(From García Oliver’s answers in 1950 to Bolloten’s questionnaire, deposited at the Hoover Institution).

“Garcia Oliver’s testimony deserves to be corroborated by that of Federica Montseny: “It did not pass through anyone’s imagination, not even that of Garcia Oliver, the most Bolshevik of all, the idea of taking revolutionary power. It was later when the breadth of the movement and the popular initiatives was seen, when it began to be discussed whether it was possible or whether it was necessary, or not, to go for the whole thing.”

(PAZ, Abel: “Durruti. The proletariat in arms.” Bruguera, Barcelona, 1978, pp. 381-382).

That is to say that having power in a critical industrial zone, the CNT left it to the bourgeois leadership of the Generalitat because it was not the time to exercise it, given that what was necessary was to beat fascism, preserving republican democracy… bourgeois. And the CNT dedicated itself to libertarian syndicalism.

(https://inter-rev.foroactivo.com/t10251-1-buenaventura-durruti-y-el-antifascismo-obrerista-y-popular-2-cnt-juan-garcia-oliver-el-papel-del-antifascismo-democratico?highlight=durruti

https://inter-rev.foroactivo.com/search?mode=searchbox&search_keywords=durruti&show_results=topics)

We read from a scholar of social struggles at that time:

“8. It is very striking that, after years and years of predicting in their congresses the coming of the revolution, once such a situation arrived, the most representative activists of the libertarian movement did not know what to do to bring it forward. Instead, trusting in the revolutionary spectacle of the first insurrectional thrust – the myth of the “people in arms,” among others, and understanding or thinking that the republican order and its promenaders had lost their power, the anarchists ignored the remains and ruins of the old State to immerse themselves in the anti-fascist alliance. On July 21, the CNT-FAI accepted an “offer” from Lluís Companys, President of the Generalitat, to share power with the Popular Front parties in the Central Committee of Anti-Fascist Militias of Catalonia (CCMAC). The CCMAC was a new body composed of all the anti-fascist political parties and trade unions, and it was created to organize the armed struggle in the areas where the coup triumphed (19). Dominated by the anarchists, the Militia Committee had the appearance of a revolutionary body, and its very creation increased the impression of the collapse of state power. In reality, the CCMAC was an inter-classist, popular-front government dominated by the unions in charge of justice, public order, distribution, and military defense; in short, a Ministry of War in all but name, which allowed anarchist leaders to participate in the CCMAC ostensibly without compromising their anti-state principles (20). So, while the rank and file of the anarchist movement carried forward their revolution in the streets, the higher committees of the CNT-FAI-FIJL allied themselves with the other anti-fascist parties, some of which were openly hostile to the revolution.

9. Politically, the creation of the CCMAC marked the limits of the revolution itself. For the defenders of the republican state, its implementation provided a respite from revolutionary change, as the Militia Committee took over areas that had briefly been under the control of the revolutionary committees. Although these continued to exist until May 1937, with the arrival of the CCMAC, they lost their autonomy and initial power. Thus, the Generalidat and the Republican State, although overshadowed during the hot summer of 1936, survived the revolution and, most importantly, maintained their legal existence. And while this was happening, the anarchist leaders made their idea of ‘democratic collaboration’ with the political parties to win the war.”

“Forcibly, the logic of the war required the creation of some authority to direct the struggle against the coup plotters. And since there was no revolutionary structure capable of coordinating the direction of the struggle, the republican-bourgeois state ended up playing that role. The anarchist hierarchy accepted and conspired to give life to that same State. Having led the CNT-FAI into “democratic collaboration” with the Popular Front forces, the anarchist leaders found themselves indispensable in coexisting with various political groups, which made no secret of their hostility to the revolutionary changes initiated from July onwards. This situation gave rise to a series of compromises that resuscitated the republican state and simultaneously undermined the authority of the revolutionary committees, all under the pretext of strengthening anti-fascist unity. (21)“

“The next important compromise by the anarchist leaders took place at the end of September 1936, when they agreed to a proposal by the Republican parties and the PSUC to reconstitute the Generalitat (22). Until then, the Militia Committee had assumed most of the powers of the old Catalan government, which, by contrast, occupied a secondary plane. However, the popular-front logic of the anarchist leaders was indispensable for them to accept the dissolution of the Militia Committee and an offer from Companys to enter the government of the Generalitat. To reach these compromises, the anarchist leaders organized a congress of the Catalan CNT on September 24, when they spoke, for the first time in the libertarian ranks, of the need to abolish the CCMAC (23). Employing a maximalist discourse, Mariano Rodríguez Vázquez “Marianet,” secretary general of the National Committee and one of the strong men of radical anarchism before the war, stated that to ensure the future of the Catalan revolutionary Economy and the changes made since July, it was necessary to collaborate with the other political groups, given that in other areas of the republican territory, anarchism did not have the same weight.”

(Chris Ealham. “From anti-fascist unity to libertarian disunity. The higher committees of the libertarian movement against the anarchist quixotes in the framework of the Popular Front 1936-1937: https://journals.openedition.org/mcv/3874 )

Guillamón says “There was a revolution in the streets and the factories, and there were potential organs of power of the revolutionary proletariat.”

This, which hardly happened in different parts of Catalonia, responded to real workers’ agitation, malaise, and desire for proletarian revenge. Still, the weaknesses, the limitations, and the illusions within the proletariat marked the course of the struggles. There was no proletarian revolution. Guillamon swims between two waters. He says there was a proletarian revolution, then he says that there was not, that it was social; sometimes, he limits it temporarily; others, he enlarges it. But not everything fits, nor is it possible. His confusion continues its course.

There could not be a class confrontation between the CCMA and the Generalidat because, as Guillamón himself knows and affirms, it was an organ of class collaboration, negating any possible anti-capitalist proletarian army. The CNT and the POUM dedicated themselves to embellishing the populist class collaboration front with leftist phraseology.

When the CNT member Garcia Oliver speaks of “going for everything”, he does not want political power so as not to establish a dictatorship. Still, the CNT would give “critical support” to the Popular Front, something that another member of the CNT, Peirats, for example, would criticize. Then everything goes that way, although he sometimes makes inflammatory statements, but in the context of anti-fascism, which causes a sector to get up from the directive meeting of CNT and leave, but without organizing an alternative force.

(see more: https://ctxt.es/es/20211101/Politica/37827/Chris-Ealham-memorias-Juan-Garcia-Oliver-anarcosindicalismo-guerra-civil.htm).

Guillamon says: “The CNT leaders distrusted the revolutionary committees,” which is a half-truth because they distrusted those they did not control and were radical. That is why they surrounded and repudiated them, which was quite effective. However, only some were radicals, and most radicals set to work to build a revolutionary organization that would confront the prevailing attitudes in the CNT. Disputes often occurred, as the prose of the CNT leadership was not necessarily borne out by coherent facts. However, the anarchist mystique and the idealized past of the CNT weighed heavily on the more radical sectors. And they did so together with a voluntarist and immediatist conception, which engendered so much practical havoc – and engenders today. This is what anarchism has repeatedly suffered from, together with theoretically inaccurate and aberrant positions on socialism, the State, the proletarian struggle, and the organization of communist society,  among others.

Thesis 3)

Guillamón states:

“The participation of the CNT-FAI in the State apparatus was based on three fundamental institutions: the CCMA, the Economic Council and the Supply Committee.”

This is indeed so. Then he adds:

“The transformation of the defense committees into neighborhood and local revolutionary committees, which sought to replace the State by managing and assuming all its functions, and the vast and wide process of spontaneous expropriation of factories by the industrial unions, gave rise to one of the most far-reaching social and economic revolutions in history.”

Not so; the self-managerial initiative was, on the one hand, limited, and on the other hand, it was carried out in coexistence with the State, so it was, in fact, a workerist appendix of it. It was a question, for anarcho-syndicalism, of readjusting through its pressure the enterprise relations and then expanding this workers’ management of the enterprises, which was carried out maintaining the wage, the commodity and the law of value, but pressing it “in favor of the working class,” which in practice conceals a laborist and self-managing reformism., which entails consequences both of mobilization and demobilization of the working class and the bourgeoisie. The traps of the businessmen took effect, and in Catalonia, they used the Generalidat as a cover but the CNT did not consider the need to eradicate it by force, and neither did the POUM. On the contrary, they entered this structure of the bourgeois state (the Spanish right wing even today affirms that Companys paid during a period of “coexistence” many rations and money to both CNT and POUM: https://www.larazon.es/cultura/historia/20211008/m7ji3myrpjckdnhqyvpljt3xg4.html).

Numerous committees accepted this tactic, and the CNT centralized them in its way. It was the realization of the myth of the abstentionist self-management of “politics”; it was the implementation of anarcho-syndicalism, but it could not be realized by previously overthrowing by force the state structures because that was a Marxist tactic rejected by anarcho-syndicalism. They dedicated themselves to making this initial level of workers’ self-management on the basis of capitalist relations compatible with the existence of the State, which rewarded them by integrating them into some of its structures to enthuse its members to work and die for the anti-fascist Popular Front and the republican democracy. In conditions of the war economy and direct warmongering, there were cases in which the distribution in kind, contingent on superior authoritarian criteria and immediate necessity, was nothing less than the practical appearance of “libertarian communism,” a twisted fallacy.

The “revolution” was postponed again, and the CNT, seconded by the POUM, dedicated itself to theorizing it as the most necessary and convenient thing. Defensist reformism necessarily imposed itself in such conditions on revolutionary and internationalist defeatism.

So, to call all this “one of the most far-reaching social and economic revolutions in history,” as Guillamón does, constitutes a fallacy that confuses and mystifies.

We read:

“The origin of the CNT militias in the Spanish Civil War is in the Defense Committees. These committees were the clandestine military organization of the CNT, financed by the trade unions, and their action was subordinated to them. Their historical antecedent is the different action groups, such as Los Solidarios, which fought against the bosses’ pistoles between 1917 and 1923.”

“On July 21, a Plenum of Local and Regional unions of the CNT renounces the seizure of power, understood as “dictatorship” of the anarchist leaders, and not as an imposition, coordination, and extension of the power that the revolutionary committees already exercised in the street. It was decided to accept the creation of the Central Committee of Antifascist Militias of Catalonia (CCMA), an organism in which all the antifascist organizations participated.

From this moment on, it is the CCMA and not the CNT-FAI who directs the military operations in Catalonia and, from there, the Aragon front. On the 24th, the first two anarchist columns left under the command of Durruti and Ortiz. In those same days, PSUC and POUM columns were also formed. In two months, the committee managed to organize 20,000 militiamen who were spread over a front of 300 kilometers. The defense committees mentioned above ceased to operate in Barcelona because either their members were in the neighborhood committees organizing the revolution or they were on the war fronts. Until May 1937, they remained inactive.”

(https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milicias_de_la_CNT

https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comit%C3%A9s_de_Defensa_de_la_CNT)

Guillamón goes on to say :

“There exists, then, a real divergence and separation between the Committee of Committees and the social and economic revolution led in the streets by the revolutionary committees and the trade unions.”

What revolutionary committees and what confrontation did they have with the CNT and the POUM? What is this about the trade unions, the UGT, the CNT, ELA, or other existing ones? This is again an exaggerated distortion, a fallacious mystification. The few Committees coexisted with the CNT and the POUM, they (referring to what?) did not consider displacing and suppressing them, like the rest of the bourgeois factions. But without that, no proletarian revolution could have taken place.

We read Guillamón in another text that is somewhat more clarifying and contradictory to this synthesis he has recently made:

“After the victory over the fascist and military uprising in Catalonia, the Defense Committees of each neighborhood (or town) were constituted in Revolutionary Committees of neighborhood (or locality), taking a great variety of denominations. These neighborhood Revolutionary Committees in the city of Barcelona were almost exclusively CNT. The local Revolutionary Committees in the different Catalan towns, on the other hand, were usually formed by the incorporation of all the workers’ and anti-fascist organizations, imitating the composition of the Central Committee of Anti-Fascist Militias (CCMA).

These Revolutionary Committees exercised, in each neighborhood or locality, especially in the nine weeks after July 19, these functions:

1) They seized buildings to install the headquarters of the Committee, buildings of a grocery store, an athenaeum, or a rationalist (libertarian; translator’s note) school. They seized and held hospitals and newspapers.

2) Armed searches in private homes to seize food, money, and valuables.

3) Armed search of private homes to arrest “cops,” ambushers, priests, right-wingers, and fifth columnists. (Let’s remember that the snipers’ “search”, in the city of Barcelona, lasted a whole week).

4) They installed in each neighborhood recruiting centers for the Militias, which they armed, financed, supplied and paid (until the end of August) with their own means, maintaining until after May 37 an intense and continuous relationship of each neighborhood with its militiamen at the front, welcoming them during furloughs.

5) In addition to custody of weapons, at the headquarters of the Defense Committee, there was always a local or warehouse where the neighborhood supply committee was installed. This committee was supplied with food requisitions made in rural areas through armed coercion, exchange, or purchase by means of vouchers.

6) Imposition and collection of the revolutionary tax in each neighborhood or locality.

The supply committee installed a popular canteen, which initially was free. Still, with the passing of the months, due to the shortage and increase in the price of food products, it had to implement a system of vouchers subsidized by the Revolutionary Committee of the neighborhood or locality. At the headquarters of the Defense Committee there was always a room for the custody of weapons and sometimes a tiny prison where the detainees could be temporarily housed.

The Revolutionary Committees exercised an important administrative task, which was very varied. They issued vouchers, food vouchers, safe conducts, passes, formed cooperatives, celebrated weddings, supplied and maintained hospitals, and seized food, furniture, and buildings. They also financed rationalist schools and athenaeums managed by the Libertarian Youth and paid militiamen or their relatives.

The neighborhood Revolutionary Committees were coordinated in the Regional Committee meetings, which the secretaries of each neighborhood Defense Committee attended. There was also a permanent Confederal Defense Committee installed in the CNT-FAI House.

For the aspects related to the seizure of substantial amounts of money and valuables, or all those tasks of detention, information and investigation that exceeded the functions of the Revolutionary Committee of the neighborhood, they went to the Investigation Service of the CNT-FAI, directed by Manuel Escorza in the CNT-FAI House.

Thus, in the city of Barcelona, the Neighborhood Defense Committees were subordinated to the following higher Committees:

1) As for the recruitment of militiamen (in July and August) and the supply of the popular militias (until mid-September), they depended on the CCMA.

2) Regarding the supply of food and necessities from the Central Supply Committee.

3) As for the organization and resolution of problems of the Regional Committee of the CNT, which gave them the orders and slogans to follow. This was the famous trade union’s dependence on the defense cadres and the denial of their autonomy, agreed in the 1934 Ponencia.

4) They coordinated and shared experiences in a Defense Committee of Barcelona, which was nothing more than the organizational step that followed the district committees. It was hardly operative.

5) For information, investigation, persecution of the fifth column, and other armed “police” work, they depended on the Information and Investigation Service of the CNT-FAI.

(Guillamon, The Defense Committees of the CNT 1933-1938)

Now let us read the CNT:

“We had encouraged the comrades of the defense cadres to acquire each of their own pistols and observe where, at a given moment, they could get hold of long and short arms. Even so, it was little, very little. Besides, it could be said that Spain began beyond Barcelona, and the agreement to set up the regional Defense Committees had not even been fulfilled there. In terms of weapons, they were worse off than we were”.

(García Oliver: The echo of the steps)

The following excerpt is placed in an endnote due to its large size. It is significant because it represents the official version of the CNT.[I]This lengthy excerpt allows us to understand the characteristics of anarcho-syndicalist action, with its long list of limitations and contradictions, placing many issues Guillamón deals with in a more explicit and authentic context. One is the action of libertarian and proletarian rebellion, and the other is a revolution. The former failed to take root in the latter. It was eliminated or derived when the leadership of the CNT and the Popular Front was able to do so, towards democratic anti-fascism, at the service of the republican bourgeoisie, corroded by factional struggles and threatened by the bourgeois right wing and the military coup sector. This is the central determining axis of the events. Guillamón probably subscribes to it, but in his narrative, some fallacies and contradictions cloud the critical and lucid understanding of what happened.

Anarcho-syndicalist workers’ self-management did not enter into profound and radical contradiction with either capitalist relations or with the necessary capitalist effort of the State and the bourgeois republican war economy. Guillamón has sometimes said it, but when he mythologizes what was carried out as a radical social revolution, he is contributing confusion, he is disseminating mystifications, and that is why he is heard in fringes of current anarcho-syndicalism giving talks in Athenaeums, libertarian social centers or with libertarian presence, with the CGT, an anarcho-syndicalist trade union of the bourgeois milieu, with its delegates of democratic Works Councils paid by the State, etc, etc, etc. In those milieus it does not look good to be coherent and radical, and Guillamón circumvents the question, as is evidenced in this video: https://kaosenlared.net/video-charla-de-agustin-guillamon-barcelona-1936-1937/ Guillamón states:

“Without the destruction of the State, there can be no proletarian revolution. One can speak of a revolutionary situation, of a revolutionary movement, of triumphant insurrection, of “partial” or “provisional” loss of the functions of the bourgeois State, of political chaos, of loss of real authority by the republican administration, of VACUUM OF CENTRALIZED POWER and atomization of power, but not of the proletarian revolution”.

Indeed, without destroying the capitalist State, there could be no successful proletarian revolution. But then Guillamon says that one can speak of triumphant insurrection when there is no destruction of the capitalist State by the working class. In the cocktail of the mixed and undifferentiated whole, Guillamón practices confusion.

On the other hand, was there a revolutionary situation in Spain? No, the working class that mobilized was neither a majority nor the content and forms of its struggle were oriented to the destruction of the capitalist State. Only some minorities, with abundant libertarian or Poum-ist confusions, wanted such destruction, but not at the cost of the CNT or its organizations occupying revolutionary power by exercising a dictatorship; that was a matter for “the Marxists.” But they were not involved in creating a class dictatorship, of the proletarian organization structured as such. Since the CNT did not want a specific anarcho-syndicalist or anarchist dictatorship, it avoided betting on the dictatorship of the proletarian class itself (which is exercised with revolutionary councils). It left de facto and de jure the republican bourgeoisie, leftist, and petty nationalists at the helm of the government and the state apparatus. On the other hand, the Spanish proletariat heard the PCE and the PSOE that the government of those parties was a proletarian dictatorship. Carrillo told them that this vileness was much better than fascists, and Largo Caballero quoted Lenin.

Guillamon continues to say:

“The revolutionary SITUATION of July 1936 never raised the question of the establishment of a workers’ power antagonistic to the Republican State: there was, therefore, no proletarian revolution if we speak in the strict sense.”

That is to say that according to Guillamón, there was a revolutionary situation but no proletarian revolution, but this is entirely confusing. For the existence of a revolutionary situation in capitalism, the proletarian class has to present developing characteristics of a revolutionary type. If this is not the case, certain conditions are present, but neither all nor the essential ones, which is why speaking of a revolutionary situation is disproportionate and distorted.

The existence of moments of dispersion of power, inaction, and decay of bourgeois capacities was worthless. It was worthless that this coexisted with numerous agitations in the ranks of the workers if, in such ranks, the conditions of independent organization and conscious clarity of a revolutionary type were not present. The revolutionary situation only occurs when the material economic and social conditions that permit the revolution provoke significant changes in the consciousness and organization of the exploited and dominated class. If this does not happen, there is a social crisis and a period of effervescence that unfolds in the key of reformist pressure, a contradictory and conjunctural period necessarily. And so it was, Francoism imposed the needs and coordinates of the right-wing bourgeois sector opposed to the Popular Front, when the proletariat was exhausted and derived inserting its energy in the struggle between sides of imperialist capitalism.

Guillamon continues:

“In the spring of 1937, the revolutionary militants found themselves isolated in the assemblies and an absolutely insurmountable minority situation. The fundamental principles of anarcho-syndicalism collapsed and gave way to opportunism masked by the ideology of anti-fascist unity (“renounce the revolution to win the war”) and the pragmatism of faithful and loyal collaboration with the parties and the government of the republican bourgeoisie, with the exclusive objective of defending capitalist democracy and the bourgeois Republic. THE CNT TRADE UNION BUREAUCRACY DEMONSTRATED ITS COUNTERREVOLUTIONARY CHARACTER IN MAY 1937”.

In other words, in the presumed revolutionary situation, the revolutionaries were in a minority and isolated, being flattened and denied by the anarcho-syndicalist bureaucracy, which was already counterrevolutionary in May 1937. Here, we find notorious contradictions. In reality, the minorities of revolutionary intention did not succeed in converting the class struggle generated by the entire political, social, and military crisis into a proletarian revolution, and there was no such revolutionary situation. Still, the channeling of the proletarian forces to the struggle in favor of the Popular Front prevailed.

Thesis 5)

Thesis 5 is generally valid and conclusive. I underline the following:

“The acceptance by the proletariat of the anti-fascist ideology meant the defense of capitalist democracy, the renunciation of asserting itself as a revolutionary class.

The bourgeois choice between fascism and anti-fascism was not only false but meant the defeat of the revolutionary and anti-capitalist alternative.

Only a few minorities, hardly influential, dared to denounce anti-fascism as a bourgeois and counterrevolutionary ideology.”

When the proletariat did not affirm itself as a revolutionary class, the social, economic, and military crisis in Spanish society could not evolve toward a proletarian revolution; there was no opening of a revolutionary situation. The CNT labeled as social revolution its activities… which were oriented in the democratic-republican wave, subordinating to it the struggle in the enterprises against capital, being substituted by the effort for the war economy against a bourgeois variant, the fascist, in favor of another, the democratic one — capitalism, in good protection, whoever wins.

Thesis 6)

Thesis 6 is generally valid as far as the collectivizations and their drift towards the republican war economy are concerned. In general, it is valid as far as the collectivizations and their drift towards the republican war economy are concerned, with some nuances that are not substantial. I underline, in terms of necessary criticism, the following paragraph by Guillamón:

“Anarcho-syndicalism and the POUM, due to theoretical incapacity in the case of the former and numerical weakness, verbalism, followerism and lack of audacity in the case of the latter, never raised the question of power, which they abandoned in the hands of the professional politicians of the republican bourgeoisie and the socialists: Azaña, Giral, Prieto, Largo Caballero, Companys, Tarradellas, Negrín, or shared it with them when their participation was necessary to close the way to a revolutionary alternative.”

The CNT did not play that role only because of theoretical incapacity but because anarcho-syndicalism leads to a workerized capitalist economy, covering up capitalist relations and state capitalism utilizing the so-called workers’ self-management. But mercantile production demands surplus value and market, which is mystified in CNT practice. The POUM was a Russian Bolshevik model party, which wanted state capitalism and which put into practice its arsenal of verbiage and radical democratism, of defense of entryism in unions and state institutions, a reformism with a maximalist facade, true and nefarious anti-revolutionary opportunism. They said that power would be transformed from within the State Institutions with the “determined external support” (Nin) of the mobilizations. This is Lenin’s tactic of “Leftism, infantile disease of communism”, it was the opportunism of the Komintern but outside the already Stalinized structures, with its maneuvers and turns in the struggle between bourgeois factions.

Guillamón, who had exalted the revolutionary Committees, now in this thesis says:

“The revolutionary committees quickly became anti-fascist committees, trade union management committees in the enterprises, went into a prolonged hibernation (like the confederal defense committees) or were transformed into state bodies.”

They quickly became comfortable in carrying out all these anti-revolutionary functions! Ahem! What a “revolutionary” quality and energy! But Guillamón further qualifies thus:

“The ambiguity and ambivalence of the control patrols, of the collectivizations, of the militias, of the defense committees, in short of the “July 19 revolution”, was a direct consequence of the very ambiguity and ambivalence of the extreme left organizations of the Popular Front (CNT and POUM). Ambiguity because the CCMA was the fruit of the proletarian insurrectionary victory of July 19 and the political failure of July 21, WHEN THE CLASS COLLABORATION WAS ACCEPTED”.

No ambiguity at all; it was the necessary expression of the left of the Popular Front, bourgeois-democratic, inter-classist, denier of international communism. On the other hand, the CCMA was already born as an anti-fascist organ favorable to the bourgeoisie of the Popular Front. There could be nothing proletarian revolutionary there. Guillamón wants to swim and keep his clothes dry, presenting something radical and nuances where mystifying phraseology abounds, presenting numerous inconsistencies and biases. What he calls the “proletarian insurrectionary victory of July 19” is nothing more than that, in some places, the proletariat defends the Republic against the Spanish military uprising. It is not an insurrection against the bourgeois state that wins, but the proletarian action defends a form of capitalist state, the republican, threatened by militarist, political, and social fascism, behind which the right wing of the CEDA, Requetés, traditionalists, JONS, Spanish Falange, etc. were going.

Thesis 7)

We agree that the description is generally acceptable and adequate to the most outstanding facts. Guillamon says:

“After May 1937, the attempts of the higher committees of the bureaucratized CNT to expel the Friends of Durruti failed since any union assembly did not ratify it. However, there was no split capable of clarifying the confronted and irreconcilable positions within the CNT”.

But he does not explain the reason for this attitude of the Agrupación de los Amigos de Durruti. Breaking with the CNT was not something they understood as necessary because they still believed in reconstituting it using the militant example and the memory of the principles, something very similar to the attitude taken by the Italian communist left regarding the Komintern… which ended up purging them mercilessly. Then came the break with the Trotskyist opposition and Trotsky’s attacks on “bordiguismo,” described as sectarian and immature etc., etc.

And that was not so, it could not be because it did not find conditions of possibility, Friends of Durruti and the Trotskyists of Grandizo Munis and company (Bolshevik-Leninist section of the IV International) wanted a radicalization of the process, but they did it confusedly.

Thesis 8)

Again, contradictions are found, particularly an exaggeration of the tensions between the leadership and the CNT rank and file for first he speaks of a “significant revolutionary opposition” in the CNT rank and file and then states that it was a minority. First he says that

“Hence the emergence of a revolutionary opposition, embodied in particular by the Friends of Durruti, the Libertarian Youth of Catalonia, some anarchist groups of the local federation of GGAA in Barcelona and, above all, by the neighborhood committees and defense of the neighborhoods of Barcelona.”

And then that:

“The institutionalization of the CNT and the adoption of the ideology of anti-fascist unity turned the higher committees into the worst enemies of the (minority) revolutionary opposition of the CNT, which was on the verge of provoking a split, which finally did not occur due to the physical elimination, imprisonment or clandestinity to which this opposition was subjected by state and Stalinist repression. This repression had a SELECTIVE character since it was directed against the revolutionary minority while at the same time trying to guarantee the integration of the higher committees into the republican state apparatus.”

Ahem.

Guillamón ends by arguing that:

“We should not speak of a betrayal of the Higher Committees, which would not explain anything, but of a CLASS confrontation between the Higher Committees, which were the STATE, and a repressed and persecuted revolutionary minority. It was not a betrayal; it was a class struggle between rulers and ruled, between rulers or aspiring rulers and ruled, between bureaucrats and workers”.

The first is true, but it is not true that workers were on one side and merely CNT trade union bureaucrats on the other since the majority of the CNT membership defended the orientations of the leadership. This shows that neither Bolshevism nor anarcho-syndicalism were forces capable of generating an international proletarian and communist revolutionary theoretical and practical tendency.

Thesis 9)

It shows how the Agrupación de los Amigos de Durruti arose, but does not delve into its characteristic contradictions and vacillations. We read that this anarchist group called for a change of government, defending one made up solely of the CNT and the UGT (39). It also demanded

“The substitution of the State and capitalism by the unions as economic institutions, the municipalities as political institutions and the federation by the base as a means of establishing links between unions and municipalities.”

Then, they would demand:

“the formation of a revolutionary junta,(19) in the form of a CNT-FAI-POUM government” (20).

They were purged and repressed, as well as widely vilified by the CNT, and the representative of the IWA, Helmut Ruediger, went further in his denunciations, characterizing the group as “Bolshevik-fascist.” (36)

(All excerpts and notes from: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrupaci%C3%B3n_de_los_Amigos_de_Durruti#CITAREFBeevor2006)

However, the Grouping, supported by the Bolshevik-Leninist section of the Fourth International, defended another way of managing the anti-fascist war initiative, which says quite a lot about its role as the extreme left of the Popular Front. El Amigo del pueblo (The Friend of the People) had a radical populist and anarcho-syndicalist workers’ orientation. In that milieu the Agrupación launched proclamations in favor of the CNT and the FAI, despite having numerous points of disagreement with both. It also stressed the need to return to “the experiences of the July and May days.”

Let us look at the positions of the Agrupación itself and also of the Juventudes Libertarias de Cataluña, which Guillamón includes in his book on Los Amigos de Durruti:

“The rejection of the militarization of the Popular Militias created serious unrest in various anarchist militia units, which took shape in the plenum of confederate and anarchist columns meeting in Valencia from February 5 to 8, 1937 (19). Pablo Ruiz attended as a delegate of the militiamen of the Durruti Column, in the Gelsa sector, reluctant to militarization, and the Pellicer brothers as representatives of the militiamen of the Iron Column (20). In the Gelsa sector, there was defiant disobedience to the orders from the Regional Committees of the CNT and the FAI to accept militarization. The hostility between the militiamen of the Durruti Column who accepted militarization and those who rejected it created serious problems, which finally led to the creation of a commission of the Column, presided over by Manzana, which raised the problem with the Regional Committee. As a result of these conversations it was decided to give all the militia members the possibility of choosing, within fifteen days, between two alternatives: the acceptance of the militarization imposed by the Republican government, or the abandonment of the front (21).”

“We are not opposed to the reorganization of the Army, since it should not be forgotten that we were the first to advocate for a single collective command […] in charge of delegations of different columns to give homogeneity to the performance of all of them… Let a new structure come, but let the Army of the People not depend on the Generality or the Central Government. The Confederation must control it”.

“During the interview, Pablo Ruiz referred to the constant retreat of the revolutionary conquests of July and to the birth of the Agrupación de Los Amigos de Durruti:

‘When we marched to the front, we left in the hands of our comrades the victorious march of the Revolution, from an anarchist point of view. But in the structuring of the Revolution, participation has been given to political parties which did not feel the revolution because they had to defend petty-bourgeois interests and the UGT, which compared to us had a reduced percentage in Catalonia […] by making a pact with them we lost the hegemony of the Revolution. They have been forced to compromise daily, with which the Revolution has been disfigured by the loss of the revolutionary conquests achieved in the first days.

This has given rise to the formation of the “Friends of Durruti” since this new organization’s primary objective is to preserve intact the postulates of the CNT-FAI.

“Pablo Ruiz ended the interview by exposing his particular vision of putting the revolution back on the right path: 1.- Using propaganda within the CNT, without exercising violence, 2.- To advocate a trade union leadership (CNT) of the Economy. 3.- To achieve the exclusion of the political parties. 4.- Not to agree or compromise with the forces that shelter the counterrevolution, that is, with the PSUC and the UGT: ‘that the trade union organization [the CNT] be in charge of the economic and social direction, without giving participation to the political parties, considering that they were not qualified to consider them as renovators. All this without trying to impose it by force, but employing propaganda within the CNT […] And I am opposed to the participation of the political parties because I consider that it would bring with it the loss of the revolution to which we must lead by all means, but never compromising with groups that besides not feeling the revolution, are in the minority.’

Balius published an article entitled “The revolution has its demands. All power to the unions” (La noche, 27-3-1937), commenting on the very long government crisis of the Generality. His consideration of the unions as organs of the revolution is fascinating. He characterized the crisis of government of the Generalidat as the result of the confrontation inherent in a duality of powers: the Generalidat legislated and decreed, but the unions did not obey the decisions of the Generalidat. For Balius the advance and consolidation of the revolution was to give power to the working class, which was summed up in the slogan: “All power to the unions”.

In the Manifesto of the Agrupación Los Amigos de Durruti they defend:

“The capitalist State, which suffered a formidable onslaught in the memorable days of July, is still standing because of the counterrevolutionary work of the petty bourgeoisie. […] The crisis of the Generalidad is a categorical demonstration that a new world must be structured, dispensing entirely with state forms. The time has come for the legion of petty bourgeois, shopkeepers, and guards to be mercilessly swept away. It is not possible to compromise with the counterrevolution […]. The present hour is one of life or death for the working class. […] Let us not hesitate. The CNT and the FAI, the organizations that gather the popular heartbeat, have to give a revolutionary solution to the impasse […] We possess the organs that have to replace the State in ruins. The Trade Unions and the Municipalities must take charge of the economic and social life […]” (14-4-1937).

“Three fascinating questions. The Economy, that is to say, all economic power, for the trade unions. The administration and a diversity of social aspects for the Municipalities. And a revolutionary Junta that, while the war lasted, would exercise control and direction it and would see to the exact fulfillment of the proletariat’s desires during the war and after the war. […] Let us try to be alert and attentive to the first signs that announce the beginning of a new phase that the workers who feel dissatisfied with the present hour are awaiting with so much vigilance” (“A new phase of the revolution.” Editorial. El Amigo del Pueblo, number 4. Barcelona, June 22, 1937)

That is to say that The Friends of Durruti accepted the framework of the incorporation of the proletariat and the enlisted republican citizenry to the war front, a war between bourgeois factions. And then they complained about the way they were treated, about the betrayals, pactisms and reformisms of the anarcho-syndicalist leadership, etc. The typical incoherencies of the battered libertarian milieus.

This alleged “vanguard” of the proletariat, which, according to Guillamón, rectified the errors and theoretical and programmatic shortcomings of the CNTists, was a vanguard, yes, but of anarchist illusions, with its maximalist verbiage and lack of substance, affirming that the war should be for the revolution, integrated into the republican fronts. They were not looking for such a revolution but to get rid of the rightists and continue the bourgeois republic with its State, its law of value, its wage labor, its commerce, its currency etc, etc.

By not undertaking what was necessary and losing themselves in activities and declarations as extreme peoples front left and anarcho-syndicalism, these libertarians indirectly propitiated a state of forces in which the dominant sectors of the republican bourgeoisie (left and right before Franco’s military coup) passed the roller and tightened the screws on the proletariat, weakened by making it believe that even in the milieu of CNT and POUM there were possibilities?

We read Los Amigos de Durruti, describing very distressing elements of the situation:

“The workers who set up a cooperative are thrown in jail by the merchants who are furious because someone got in the way of their thievery; our comrades in the countryside who improved the conditions of cultivation by making an effort so that the agrarian Economy would yield what was indispensable for the combatants at the front, and their brothers in the city to be provided with basic necessities, are persecuted, rounded up, and their bodies toasted by the sun and burdened by exhausting days are locked up behind bars as if in the credit of these brave comrades there was any sign of opposition to the new world that was dawning with flashes of blood in mid-July of last year; the militiamen are also arrested, although their bodies are stitched up by the enemy’s bullets; and the workers of the city who in May went out to defend the economic and social conquests also go to Jefatura, to the blocks of Nestlé, and to the Modelo prison, prettily made up with the nickname of Preventorio Judicial, and the comrades coming from foreign lands who not many weeks ago paraded gallantly through our streets, amidst the unanimous applause of the working class and that fist in the air gave a world color to our struggle against fascism, are treated as common criminals, these comrades that we have seen them cry with emotion when they set foot on Spanish soil are now going through the trance of being persecuted by those who received them with airs of a marked international flavor, not so long ago. It is not surprising that it is the working class that is being mistreated by the seductive anti-fascists. […]

(The work of bourgeois democracy”. El Amigo del Pueblo, number 7. Barcelona, August 31, 1937).

Guillamón says that “Ruta, spokesman of the Libertarian Youth of Catalonia … had expressed his radical opposition to the collaborationism of the CNT since November 1936”.

And what did he oppose? We read what the JJLL of Catalonia defended:

“War and revolution are two aspects that cannot be separated. War is the armed defense of the revolution”, the direction of the Economy by the unions, Army and public order under workers’ control: arms must be solely in the hands of the proletariat as a guarantee of the revolution, the petty bourgeoisie must nourish the battalions of fortifications, the rearguard must live for the war: work must be obligatory and forced unionization, etcetera.”

But the war was the proper one, a conflict between two bourgeois sides in imperialist capitalism, with the future of a coming World War II and what it entailed.

By mystifying the proletarian class by saying that in the inter-bourgeois war, the proletarian revolution can be made defending one side, the anti-fascist, the anarchists functioned as recruiters of proletarians for a bloody bourgeois cause. They did it by idealizing the union as the leading center of society, together with the democratic and federalist Municipalities and other blablablá that clouded the role of the anarcho-syndicalist state capitalism.

Miguel Amorós, in his book, says that the Agrupación

“demanded an authentically proletarian justice and union control of local administration, public order, economy and distribution: it was the “All power to the unions” advocated before by the group “We.” It also called for forming a revolutionary army and the constitution of a Revolutionary Junta comprised of workers, peasants, and militiamen.”

https://kaosenlared.net/conversacion-sobre-los-amigos-de-durruti/

The Grouping mythologized the “first revolution”, but was aware of the anti-revolutionary situation, saying

“The present moment has nothing revolutionary about it. The counterrevolution feels it has the power to commit all kinds of outrages. The prisons are full of workers. The prerogatives of the proletariat are in frank decline […]. There is no other road left but that of a new revolution. Let us go to its preparation. And in the heat of the new deed, we will meet again in the streets with the comrades who today battle on the fronts, the comrades who lie behind bars, and the comrades who in the present hour have not yet lost hope of a revolution that renders justice to the working class”.

Guillamón himself, in an interview presenting his book of texts of the Agrupación Los Amigos de Durriti, says:

“However, the confrontation between the state and reformist anarchism of the higher committees of the CNT-FAI and the revolutionary anarchism of Los Amigos de Durruti and the neighborhood committees was not precise and forceful enough to provoke a split that would clarify the antagonistic positions of both.”

(http://www.cazarabet.com/conversacon/fichas/fichas1/amigosdurruti.htm)

Why wasn’t it? Guillamón does not dare to dig into the wound.

Why was the confrontation to which he alludes neither “precise” nor “forceful”? Silence on his part, at most we see some observations here and there, without elaborating a critical and radically materialistic interpretation.

For the Group, the working class representatives were the trade unions. With the presence of the trade unions in power, it is impossible to speak of a proletarian revolution. What does Guillamón say about this? And those who give it space and say they oppose the trade unions for being bourgeois instruments? Significant silences.

(https://www.pepitas.net/libro/los-amigos-de-durruti https://latiendacomprometida.com/anarquismo/439-los-amigos-de-durruti.html )

Thesis 10)

Guillamón tells part of what happened in Barcelona (mind you! that the rest of Spain existed, although …), and says:

“The defense committees of the neighborhoods of Barcelona overwhelmed the superior committees and, on May 3, unleashed a revolutionary insurrection that escaped their control.”

which is a tremendous exaggeration, which does not correspond to what happened. These Committees did not go towards the seizure of political power by destroying the bourgeois State, but rather they put pressure on the real State and tried to supplant it on a necessarily limited scale, fictitiously considering that in this way they would avoid the pernicious Marxist-statist strategy considered by them as pernicious.

Guillamón then comments:

“A few days later, on June 14, the Political Advisory Committee (CPA) was formally constituted, which was nothing more than a resurrection and updating of the Committee of Committees created in July 1936. The reasons were the same: the need for an executive body that would quickly make the most important and urgent decisions. But a new reason was added: the defense committees were NOT to take over from the higher committees, as had happened in May. To supplant, control and avoid a new outburst of the defense committees, the Liaison Committee was created, subordinate to the CAP.”

This is true, but it shows that the neighborhood committees were neither radical, clear, nor powerful. They were simply not totally controlled by the official CNT leadership at any given moment. Nevertheless, the needs imposed themselves acutely in the class conflicts, and sectors of those Committees acted in the immediate as they felt was convenient.

They never questioned the CNT, but only some questioned specific tactics, decisions, and actions, considered dirigiste, pernicious, and bureaucratic, and their conception of the class struggle suffered from severe problems and significant limitations. The confused and localist immediatism was a terrain in which much proletarian rage was dispersed, preventing the confluence of the class force of the proletariat for the destruction of the bourgeois state. CNT launched, when it was convenient, specific centralizing guidelines but systematically promoted the realization of scattered initiatives, many in confluence with radical enlightened petty bourgeois sectors.

Thesis 11)

Guillamón again exaggerates and distorts the role of the revolutionary Committees. He states: “the revolutionary committees assumed the task of destroying the State and substituting it in all its functions”. However, this does not fit with the actual practice, as the CNT leadership assumes control without these Committees emerging as autonomous revolutionary organisms. Only after experiencing repeated affronts, manipulations, and disappointments in anti-fascist war columns at the service of the bourgeois Republic did the Agrupación Amigos de Durruti and expressions such as the Columna de Hierro emerge, in addition to some other less known or individual ones (there were multiple and varied desertions).

Guillamón, ending this thesis, the last one, launches into an idealistic and mystifying apology of what “should have been” the CNT:

“The role of the CNT, as a union, perhaps should have been temporarily reduced to the management of the economy, but subordinating and dissolving itself in the new organization created by neighborhood, local, factory, supply, defense and other committees. The massive incorporation of workers, many of whom had been absent until then from the organized proletarian world, introduced a new reality.”

“The CNT-FAI should have been the ferment of the new revolutionary organism, coordinator of the committees, disappearing in the very process of revolutionary fermentation (at the same time that the other organizations and parties were dissolved).

After the victorious workers’ insurrection, the defeat of the Army, and the confinement of the forces of order, the destruction of the State ceased to be an abstract futurist utopia.

The destruction of the State by the revolutionary committees was a very concrete and actual task, in which these committees assumed all the tasks and functions that the State had exercised before July 1936″.

The confusion and distortion reach considerable levels. Guillamón wants to claim pears to the elm and disregards both the critical left communist analyses of the GIC on the CNT, as well as others in the Italian and internationalist communist left. “Should” and “could have been” do not fit with a rigid materialist method.

In his book Los Amigos de Durruti. History and anthology of texts (https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=http://grupgerminal.org/%3Fq%3Dsystem/files/2013-11-00-amigos-guillamon-1.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwiD9OfIjNaGAxWYg_0HHRGvDGIQFnoECBEQAQ&usg=AOvVaw0lRguDlS8xsipNPm3QUQ53) Agustín Guillamón writes:

“Meanwhile, in the streets and factories of Barcelona, the workers and the people, mostly of Confederate militancy and sympathy, did not pose so many false problems. They acted autonomously, taking on all the tasks of the moment: they expropriated the factories, formed collectives, controlled the Economy, supplied and fed towns and cities, formed militias to defeat fascism where it had triumphed, deepening and extending the social revolution in progress, without ever renouncing their revolutionary program. And with their expropriating practice and their class instinct, they put into practice, at the local level, the immediate destruction of the State and capitalist social relations”.

An “immediate destruction of the State” that left the actual state structures in place in the context of the reign of capitalist relations. Ahem!

Guillamón receives applause from the libertarian milieu that is content with this and many other chatters.

With this text and the two previously published reviews:

https://inter-rev.foroactivo.com/t13012-1-once-tesis-clasistas-sobre-la-revolucion-y-la-contrarrevolucion-en-cataluna-1936-1938-por-una-teoria-anarquista-de-las-revoluciones-basada-en-un-analisis-materialista-de-los-hechos-historicos-a-guillamon-2-dos-cri, I consider that my position is sufficiently clear.

Anibal (13-06-2024)

Source

Aníbal, “Redoblan sus aplausos los tirios y les siguen los troyanos”. Crítica pormenorizada del texto de Agustín Guillamón “Once tesis clasistas sobre la revolución y la contrarrevolución en Cataluña (1936-1938). Por una teoría anarquista” , 13-6-2024. Translation by F.C.

For further reading

• “Bilan” and the communist left in Italy on class struggle and imperialist war in Spain.
• The lessons of the events in Spain. Bilan, nº 36. (1936)
• On the class struggle in the Republic and the Spanish war. Defense of the internationalist communist left: Critique of the false friends. Texts of BILAN. Texts of the GIC and other internationalist and councilist groups.
• Agustín Guillamón and his book CNT vs AIT . A necessary critique.
• Anarcho-syndicalism in action. II Spanish Republic, CNT, labor, syndical bank, state capitalism, mixed formulas with private capital, republican democratic war economy, centralization.
• Text by A.Guillamón (Los Comités de defensa de la CNT), and some comments.
• Josep Rebull or the revolutionary way (Agustín Guillamón)
• Miserable defamation and misery of defamation. Agustín Guillamón on the internationalist communist position in the Spanish war.
• Homage in the Parliament of Catalonia to Andreu Nin. The POUM in the class struggle.
• Catalan nationalism, communist proletarian internationalism, CDRs. Again Agustín Guillamón spreading confusion.
• The confederal defense committees. Juan J. Alcalde.
• The industry between war and revolution, 1936-39. Jordi Catalan.Universitat de Barcelona.

Endnote

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[I] “On July 18, CNT and UGT declared a general strike throughout Spain. The uprising was imminent, and the CNT asked companies, on repeated occasions, to open the barracks and make the arms depots available to the workers’ forces so they could confront the reaction. The president of the Generalidat flatly refused again and again. All this, even though he had only two thousand poorly equipped guards to face an army of some five thousand soldiers equipped with weapons of war. Companys feared the triumph of the fascist uprising, but much more, he feared handing over the keys of Barcelona to the anarchist social revolution of the CNT, the union that for years had been dedicated to repressing from power.

The sirens of the factories and ships in the port of Barcelona launched their persistent shrieks, which gave goosebumps to the troops rebelling against the Spanish people and for a Nazi-fascist Spain. A frantic cry of combat for those who knew what their howling demands meant… Forward, confederal defense cadres! Forward, anarchist groups! Forward, libertarian youth and free women! Once again, forward, old men of action who, from the past, only keep the memories and the hidden pistol!

On the radio, Companys sang the same tune as in October 1934. He had learned nothing. Accompanied by the hierarchs of the Popular Front, with their backs to the wall, he cried out for help from Radio Barcelona, installed in the palace of the Generalidat. Earlier, in the early hours of the morning, from the balcony of the police headquarters on Avenida Layetana, I had seen the leaders of anarcho-syndicalism, Ascaso, Durruti, García Oliver, with machine guns in hand, accompanied by their group brothers, Jover, Ortiz, Aurelio, Sanz, “Valencia,” in trucks full of confederate militants, rifles raised, red and black flags in the wind.

Durruti and I responded to Companys’ request, which was transmitted to us by an Assault lieutenant at the door of the Construction Union and the Regional Committee. He was surrounded by army officers in Security and Assault command posts: Escofet, the Guarner brothers, Herrando, sergeants, and corporals. When he saw us, opening his arms, he exclaimed: “Filis meus, gents de la CNT, avui sou l’única esperanga de Catalunya! Oblideu-ho tot i salven les llibertats del nostre poblé!” (“My sons, people of the CNT, today you are the only hope of Catalonia! Forget everything and save the liberties of our people!”).

That was ridiculous. There was too much forgetfulness of the past, of the commitments made and not fulfilled. Federico Escofet, commissioner of Public Order, Commander Guarner, Captain Guarner, and Herrando, “the one with the wig,” chief of the Assault Guards of Barcelona, watched us with curiosity.

Companys called us to try to capitalize on our presence as one more bodyguard for his defense.

“Is that all, Companys?” I said, “I thought you were calling us to give us weapons. We are leaving. Nothing is lost to us here.”

“No, I don’t have any weapons to give you. I just wanted to wish you all the best of luck.”

I was about to start a speech, and we thought it better to leave without saying anything else, lest his guard should also think of revolting. After all, nothing important would be said to us by Companys.

On July 19, the uprising would reach Barcelona, where, for the military rebels – under the command of Llano de la Encomieda, General Goded being the most responsible for the whole region – the coup was nothing more than a simple military parade, as was usual — a crass mistake. In many parts of the country, especially in the streets of Barcelona, the controversial anarcho-syndicalist “revolutionary gymnastics” practiced throughout the Republican government would bear fruit.

When the military began the preparation of their coup d’état in the Confederal Defense Committee of Barcelona, we were almost a year and a half ahead of them in the study of the plans to counteract the military uprising. The Confederal Defense Committee had existed since the early days of the Republic. The Confederate Defense Squads as well. But our combatant apparatus was preparing for revolutionary struggles in which we would have the initiative.”

” he members of the Defense Committees began to be called and be known as “the militiamen.” Without any transition, the defense cadres were transformed into Popular Militias. The primary structure of the defense cadres provided for their expansion and growth through the incorporation of secondary cadres. It was enough to make room in them for the thousands of volunteer workers who joined the fight against fascism. Men and women took to the streets, but arms were still lacking.”…”…” The military, in defeat, retreated to the floors of the building in the lower part of which the music hall Moulin Rouge was located. Climbing up the stairs of the houses opposite, on the other side of the Parallel, from the rooftops and two shooting angles, we razed the balconies of the top floor until a white rag appeared tied to the end of a rifle as a sign of surrender. With all caution, we approached, sticking to the walls, until we reached the wide doorway of the house. There were about six officers in shirts, dirty with dust, their fists clenched along their bodies, looking at the ground, frowning, firm, almost stepping on the tips of their toes. Surely, they expected to be shot on the spot.

-What shall we do with them? -Ascaso asked.

-Ortiz should take them to the Madera union, to Calle del Rosal, and keep them prisoners until the struggle is over.

With the conflict practically resolved in favor of the CNT-FAI, General Goded hardly believed his eyes. He had to surrender, but in spite of having announced his surrender over the city radio, some of the rebel troops decided not to surrender.

At eleven o’clock in the evening of the same day, a group of military rebels resisted being locked behind the gates of the San Andrés barracks. The barracks housed thirty thousand rifles, among other things. With the battle already decided, the anarcho-syndicalist combatants did not find it difficult to reduce the soldiers and take over the arsenal.

From then on, power in Barcelona changed hands. Now control was not in the hands of the government of the Generalitat, nor of the Spanish Republic, but in the hands of the CNT.”

“In the rest of the country, as in the provinces, the military garrisons joined the uprising or were defeated by the armed workers; the state was being torn into fragments. This power of the executive branch was picked up by the people in the streets, spontaneously creating replacement entities. As an anonymous anarcho-syndicalist militant said:

“These organs of the revolution have brought as consequences, in all the provinces of Spain dominated by us, the disappearance of the government delegates because these had nothing more to do than obey the agreements of the Executive Committees. In other orders, the Provincial Councils and the City Councils have been converted into skeletons from which life has escaped, because all the life concerning these administrative bodies of the old bourgeois regime was replaced by the revolutionary vitality of the workers’ unions”.

Returning to Barcelona, with the war over, Companys requested an interview with a delegation of the regional committee of the CNT. Armed to the teeth and still covered with the dust of the street fighting, a CNT-FAI delegation composed of Durruti, García Oliver and Gregorio Jover, among others, went to the Palace of the Generalitat of Catalonia to meet with Companys, president of the Generalitat, former lawyer of the CNT and its later persecutor.

In a room next to the office, representatives of all the political groups in Catalonia awaited the verdict of anarcho-syndicalism. However, the delegation could not agree without consulting the unions. The entire confederal militancy of Barcelona and the region was impatiently awaiting the arrival of the delegates so that they could be informed and thus make a decision.

This is what Companys told them:

‘First, I must tell you that the CNT and the FAI have never been treated as they deserved for their true importance. You have always been harshly persecuted, and I, with much pain, but forced by the political realities that before I was with you, afterward I have been indispensable to confront and persecute you. Today, you are the masters of the city and Catalonia because only you have defeated the fascist military. I hope you will not be sorry. I remind you that you have not lacked the help of the few or many loyal men of my party and the guards and policemen (of the squadron, autonomic police).

I cannot, then, knowing how and who you are, use a language that is not very sincere. You have won, and everything is in your power; if you do not need me or do not want me as President of Catalonia, tell me now, and I will become one more soldier in the fight against fascism. If, on the contrary, you believe in this post that only dead I would have left before the triumphant fascism, I can, with the men of my party, my name, and my prestige, be helpful in this fight, that although it ends today and my prestige in the city, we do not know when and how it will end in the rest of Spain, you can count on me and on my loyalty as a man and a politician who is convinced that today a whole past of embarrassment dies, and who sincerely wishes that Catalonia goes to the head of the most advanced countries in social matters.’

Following the meeting, and at Companys’ proposal, on July 21 a provisional Central Committee of Anti-Fascist Militias of Catalonia was set up, made up of all the forces of the Popular Front, pending what the CNT regional committee would agree at its next meeting. With a view to dealing with this matter, on July 23, a regional plenum of locals took place in the new headquarters of the CNT-FAI regional committee of Catalonia, which had come to occupy the Casa Cambó.”

“The Central Committee of Antifascist Militias.

At the beginning of the regional plenum of local and regional councils, the militancy was consulted on the possibility of joining the newly formed Central Committee of Anti-Fascist Militias of Catalonia (otherwise, it would be dissolved), which would be composed not only of the CNT-FAI but also of all the organizations that supported the Republican government.

The Comarcal del Baix Llobregat, which understood that the Militia Committee would block the march of the social revolution, proposed to proceed with the revolution. This would end up implanting libertarian communism, consistent with the Organization’s agreements and ideological principles and aims.

García Oliver argued that the revolutionary march was acquiring such depth that it was indispensable for the CNT to take into account that as the majority piece of the revolutionary complex, it could not leave the revolution without control and guidance because this would create a great vacuum, which, as in Russia in 1917, would be taken advantage of by the Marxists of all tendencies to take over the revolutionary leadership, crushing anarchism. The time had come, with all responsibility, to finish what had begun on July 18, discarding the Militia Committee and forcing events in such a way that, for the first time in history, the anarcho-syndicalist unions would go for the whole, that is, to organize libertarian communist life in all of Spain.

CNT-FAI Regional Committee.

CNT-FAI House. The new headquarters of the regional committee of Catalonia in the Casa Cambó.

A broad sector opposed what Oliver said, among the most prominent being Diego Abad de Santillán (who said that foreign powers would never consent to establish anarchy in the country), Marianet, and Federica Montseny. The latter even accused him of wanting to establish an anarchist dictatorship (an absurd contradiction). Montseny believed that the revolutionary road was open without the need to force events and that the people in arms would do the rest. Oliver retook the floor:

“In such serious and decisive moments, it would be convenient to raise the content of the debate because the revolution initiated on July 18 was led or would end up being betrayed. And it would be betrayed if, in a Plenary called to trace the destinies of our Organization, the majority in Catalonia and a great part of Spain, we dwarf the debate with arguments of seductive anarchism. We cannot go quietly to our homes after finishing the Plenum tasks. No matter what the Plenum agrees, we will not be able to sleep peacefully for a long time because if we, who are in the majority, do not give a direction to the revolution, others, who are still today in the minority, with their arts and tricks of corruption and elimination, will take the masses out of the vacuum in which we will have left them, and soon the joy that fills Federica with joy will be replaced by the sadness and pain that the Russian anarchists had to live, who so naively allowed themselves to be eliminated by the Bolsheviks.”

[…]”Of all the known types of dictatorship, none has yet been exercised by the joint action of the workers’ unions. And if these workers’ unions are of anarchist orientation and their militants have been trained in an anarchist morality like us, to presuppose that we would incur in the same actions as the Marxists, for example, is as much as to affirm that anarchism and Marxism are fundamentally the same ideology since they produce identical fruits. I do not admit such simplicity. And I affirm that syndicalism, in Spain and the whole world, is in urgent need of an act of affirmation of its constructive values before the history of humanity because, without that demonstration of capacity to build a free socialism, the future would continue to be the heritage of the political forms that emerged in the French Revolution, with the plurality of parties at the beginning and with a single party at the end.”

[…]Juan García Oliver and the Comarcal del Baix Llobregat were the only ones who defended going for the whole. Instead, the plenary preferred collaboration with the other left-wing sectors (all minority), thus renouncing usufruct political power in Catalonia. Therefore, it was agreed to join the militia committee – which had already been provisionally formed – and elected as members G. Oliver, Marcos Alcón (Durruti’s substitute), José Asens, Aurelio Fernández and Diego Abad de Santillán.

The next day, July 24, La Columna Durruti, formed by some 2,500 militiamen, left Barcelona and headed straight for Zaragoza, to liberate the city from the fascist yoke and thus spread the social revolution.”

“The Defense Committees of each neighborhood (or town) were constituted in Revolutionary Committees of neighborhood (or locality), taking a great variety of denominations. These neighborhood Revolutionary Committees, in Barcelona, were almost exclusively CNT. The local Revolutionary Committees, on the contrary, were usually formed by incorporating all the workers’ and antifascist organizations, imitating the composition of the Central Committee of Antifascist Militias.”

“Collectivization in industry and services.

Once the rebellion was put down, productive activity resumed. In some cases, the owners had abandoned their enterprises or not dared to impose their authority because they lacked the coercive force of the State. In others, the workers proceeded immediately and on their initiative to implement the collectivizing process, taking directly into their hands the control and management of most of the enterprises; it should be noted that all this was carried out spontaneously.

The spontaneous character of the collectivization means that it was not carried out following the slogans, instructions, or directives of some state leadership body or some party or trade union but based on the workers’ decision. These, through their factory and branch organizations, put into practice the ideas and conceptions they had regarding how society in general and economic activity in particular should be organized and function; these ideas being, to a great extent, the fruit of the libertarian training and propaganda developed during the previous decades through the athenaeums, unions, cooperatives, etc…”

“The collectivization of the enterprise meant that its ownership passed from private to public and that its own workers ran and managed it. But for the collectivists, this was only the beginning of a broader process of collectivization -socialization, which, starting with the collectivization of the enterprises should, and so it partially happened, advance in the coordination of economic activity by branches and localities and from bottom to top, until the complete socialization of wealth was achieved.

However, very soon, the leading bodies of the CNT-FAI gave up trying to ensure that the process of collectivization-socialization could culminate in its development, alleging that in those circumstances, this would have meant imposing their dictatorship. This renunciation gave rise to internal confrontations and the progressive abandonment of its assumptions and principles.”

” In addition to these three bodies at the global level of the grouping, at each of the other levels – work center, locality, etc. – There were also their equivalents, which had the autonomy to resolve issues that affected only their area.

Great importance was attached to vertical and horizontal intercommunication within the group and ensuring this was rapid and fluid.

In the legalized groups, there was also the Comptroller of the Generalitat, appointed by the “conseller” of Economy at the proposal and in agreement with the workers, who was in charge of maintaining the relationship with the higher bodies – the Council of Economy, the “conseller” of Economy, etc…”…” They introduced changes in the types of products, due to the needs of the war…”

” The war industry

In 1936, Catalonia completely lacked an industry dedicated to the manufacture of armaments. Therefore, to have war material, the civilian industry — especially metallurgy and chemistry — was quickly transformed into a war industry.

This transformation was initiated by the workers themselves immediately after July 19, and on July 21, Eugenio Vallejo, of the Metallurgical Union, was appointed to coordinate the organization of these industries.

On August 7, the Generalitat created the War Industry Commission, which controlled and coordinated these industries — the commission the CNT accepted after obtaining a series of guarantees. In practice, the collaboration between the works councils and the Commission was very satisfactory. In addition to coordinating the companies transformed into war industries, the Commission also created some new companies and established relations with the others that produced auxiliary products for the war in the textile sector, optics, wood, etc.”

“Given the relative stabilization of the situation and the need to reinforce the role of a Generalitat government that had been recovering its influence, on October 1, 1936, the Central Committee of Anti-Fascist Militias was self-dissolved, for the exclusive benefit of the complete restoration of the Generalidat’s power. The decrees signed on October 24 on the militarization of the Militias as of November 1 completed the disastrous balance of the Central Committee of Antifascist Militias. It went from a workers’ militia of revolutionary volunteers to a classic bourgeois army, subject to the monarchist code of military justice directed by the Generalitat.

This decree of militarization of the Popular Militias produced great discontent among the volunteer militiamen. After long and bitter discussions, part of the militiamen left the fronts, as was the case of several hundred militiamen of the Durruti Column established in the sector of Gelsa (Zaragoza) who decided to leave the front in March 1937 and return to the rear. It was agreed that the relief of the militiamen opposed to militarization would take place in the course of fifteen days. They left the front, taking their weapons with them.

Already in Barcelona, together with other anarchists (defenders of the continuity and deepening of the July Revolution, and opposed to confederal collaborationism with the government), the Gelsa militiamen decided to form an anarchist organization, distinct from the FAI, the CNT or the Libertarian Youth, whose mission would be to channel the anarchist movement along the revolutionary path. Thus, the new Agrupación was formally constituted in March 1937, after a long gestation period of several months that began in October 1936. The Board of Directors was the one that decided to take the name of “Agrupación de Los Amigos de Durruti,” a name that, on the one hand, alluded to the common origin of the former militiamen of the Durruti Column and that, as Balius rightly said, was not taken by any reference to Durruti’s thought, but to his popular mythification.”

“This revolutionary opposition to the militarization of the Popular Militias was also manifested, with greater or lesser luck, in all the confederal columns. The case of Maroto, condemned to death for his refusal to militarize the column he led, a sentence that was never carried out but which kept him in prison, stands out for its importance outside Catalonia. Another outstanding case was that of the Iron Column, which decided on several occasions to “go down to Valencia” to promote the revolution and confront the counterrevolutionary elements in the rearguard.

In February 1937, an assembly of confederal columns was held, which dealt with the question of militarization. The threats of not supplying arms, food, or soldiers to the columns that did not accept militarization, added to the conviction that the militiamen would be integrated into other units, already militarized, had an effect. Many felt it was better to accept militarization and adapt it flexibly to their column. Finally, the ideology of anti-fascist unity and the collaboration of the CNT-FAI in governmental tasks, in defense of the Republican State, triumphed against resistance to militarization.”

(https://valencia.cnt.es/que-es-la-cnt/historia/julio-de-1936-la-revolucion-social-espanola/)