Address by Federica Montseny, 3 January 1937

“Comrades and friends:

I have accepted the honor of initiating this series of talks with the pleasure of one who must comply with a self imposed obligation, for anyone who has plotted the position of classical anarchism must today plot also the precise position to which it has been brought by the events through which we are living.

We as anarchists have amended nothing of that which was consubstantial with our very selves. That declaration needed to be made. We are anarchists, we remain such and we pursue the same ideals as ever. Events have nothing to do with what the Spanish anarchist movement is and shall continue to be. But a distinction has to be made between the immobile ideal and the eternal aspiration. An immobile ideal, a stagnant ideal which has no flexibility, no agility and no ability to react (it and its representatives) in accordance with the circumstances. Such an ideal is doomed to be overtaken, pushed aside and replaced by other ideals. This is what we Spanish anarchists have been able to take into account. Without the ideal’s ceasing to be the same, without the anarchist ideas having been forced to beat a retreat in the face of the formidable experience of the historical situation and Spanish circumstances, we have managed to adapt ourselves, been able to find our niche, and to put into practice the physical precept with which Tarrida del Marmol defined the word authority. “Authority is something from which we keep subtracting and of which some remnant always remains and which we must aim always to diminish.”

Nobody could have foreseen the events which came in the wake of 19 July: we, however, did not lose our grasp of the situation and we went on acting just as we had up to then, for, since the advent of the republic, no organization had given so much proof of revolutionary fervor as had ours. A reformist socialism, an almost universal preference for accommodation had been a brake upon the revolutionary process. Our steadfastness, the spur (what we might term our obsession) was necessary to whittle away at the forces which opposed the advances of the proletariat; it also successfully shifted reformist socialism as such on to a revolutionary footing. And so we come to the army revolt resisted by the proletariat, whose heroic resistance shaped events and led to a new dawn. A mass upheaval came to pass in Spain and our people hurled themselves into a revolution that has nothing in common with the Russian revolution nor with other upheavals. There would have been no revolution had we not prepared the people. This is our triumph and the most cherished prize that we anarchists possess.

Without distorting anarchist philosophy, we have managed to adapt ourselves to circumstances. There have been instances when anarchists elsewhere in the world could scarcely understand the Spanish anarchist. I intend no criticism of anarchists. One cannot censure a movement, nor a few individuals. We, like the statist communists or socialists, insist upon the total realization of our ideals. Once this was agreed, our position boiled down to this: either we remain in opposition, in an opposition incomprehensible in that we all had to marshal our efforts around the bourgeois republic (bourgeois, but it stood for liberalism against fascism) or we make our own stand wherever circumstances obliged us to. Had all the comrades from Europe, America and elsewhere, who cannot comprehend what we are doing with Spanish anarchism, been in Spain we would have seen how they would have acted and their mental response to the events which had come to pass, with facts so very different from what we had imagined. The ideals are the same, but sometimes one has no option but to amend even one’s opinion of the facts which occurred in such a way other than the manner anticipated. Nobody could have known that we would be making the revolution at the same time as waging a war. Not a civil war like the civil wars of the last century in which there was a parity of forces, but a modern war with every element required for the struggle.

Had we proceeded on 19 July to implement the totality of our libertarian ideals, the upshot would have been catastrophic, just as it would have been had the statist communists or socialists made the attempt. Such an attempt would have smashed the common front. For this reason we were the first to introduce a note of deliberation into our aspirations. The Spanish people’s battle against fascism, itself a bold and grandiose effort by an unarmed people, a people that needed several days to stir the conscience of other peoples, found us alone in our will to be free beings, as against the authoritarian penchant of international fascism. We stand for a movement opposed to the ever-aggressive imperialisms of Italy and Germany. And already this contest is so great that victory over fascism was well worth the laying down of our lives.

We Spanish anarchists, cognizant of the overwhelming needs, imposed by the circumstances of the moment, have espoused a line of conduct designed to avoid a repetition of what happened in Russia where anarchism, for all its might, was ousted from the leadership of the revolution by a minority organization.

On 19 July we were the most important labor movement in Spain, at least as far as Catalonia was concerned, and we could have embarked upon the adventure of wholesale conquest of our ideals. We did not, lest it wreck everything. By our attitude we have prevented anyone’s being able to bridle the effervescence of the people by means of a dictatorship.

The CNT’s entry into the central government and into the Generalidad Council of Catalonia ensured that the anarchist movement was not ousted from the leadership of the revolution. What was needed was a genuine united front of the entire proletariat and of all antifascist elements so as to erect an impregnable bulwark against international fascism which had turned the peninsula into its field of operations, and how the people which are beating the fascists are making social advances by calling into existence a new concept of life, a new society.

Tell me if what we are doing is not great. When we reflect upon the times in which we live we astound ourselves. And we will think on how we have found it possible to overcome such huge obstacles.

Of all the problems posed by the present hour, the problem of the war is the most straightforward, in that we have been able to achieve and to maintain the unity of all workers, republican, socialist, communist and anarchist who know that fascism represents strangulation, something tougher than the late dictatorship because the fascist movement has been injected with German and Italian fascism.

Hatred of fascism and the urge to defeat it binds us together but now imagine the picture once the war is over, with different ideological forces which will wrestle for dominion over one another. Once the war is ended, the problem will crop up again in Spain with the same characteristics as featured in France and in Russia. We must make our stand here and now. We have to spell out our points of view so that the other parties may know what is what, and we may all, in a candid, loyal way arrive at the unity needed for the future. We have to seek out the platform, the common ground that enables us, with the greatest freedom and minimum scheme of economic achievements, to press on along the road upon which we have embarked until we reach our goal.

Already we have spoken of what we want once the war has ended. What we say today we had been saying before the war. And we said that there was something consubstantial with the history of Spain and with the aspirations of the people as manifested in each moment erupting consciousness, such as the revolt by the comuneros of Castile or of the Catalan segadores, which long ago asserted our people’s stand against centralizing, all-absorbing authority… this aspiration, a source of wonder to other lands, startled by the climate of liberty and democracy by which it was informed, and which was the assertion of our own individuality over anything that may have spelled tyranny or oppression.

We all have the same racial feeling for liberty against oppression, and against humiliation and for this reason the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, that farce, was unable to prevail in Spain, any more than Mola and Franco will be able to make theirs prevail, for our people prefers death over slavery.

Our concept of organization is straightforwardly federalist. Of myself in particular it has been said that I am closer to Pi y Margall than to Bakunin. I can state that all we Spanish anarchists see eye to eye with Pi y Margall’s philosophical, economic and political outlook because Pi y Margall was able to discover the very essence of our spirit. Federalism is the guarantee that the outcome of the contest will be prolific in terms of material benefits for the workers of the cities and countryside, making Spain what hitherto she has not been. We must all be federalists. Despite their centralistic outlook, an inheritance from the centralistic mentality of Marx and one that has to be remedied, the communists must be federalists. All republicans are federalists and we must be federalists too in accepting the establishment of the Iberian Federation of Socialist Republics which will give each region the right to order its own affairs. To date, Spain has been a monstrous head upon a wizened body. All of the country’s wealth flows to Madrid.

The economic reconstruction of the country is an impossibility if the bourgeoisie retain their power. Should any move be made to restore power to the bourgeoisie, that would be the greatest of catastrophes. The workers will brave sacrifice for the sake of revolution and will step up production for the sake of the revolution, but should this be asked of them for anything other than the victory of the revolution, it will be to no avail and indeed the workers will not countenance it. In fighting against fascism, the Spanish people is simultaneously fighting against social inequalities, against the señoritismo of the Spanish people, even though greater sacrifices be asked of it for after the war and for the success of the revolution, as it has a good fighting morale, and it will stick to its post and work for its own sake and for its children’s, but it will never do it so that someone may make his fortune alone; it will work and it will struggle only for itself and for the future. Let no one lose sight of this fact. A civil war does not come into it. This is the people’s war, the war of the workers against the lordling, the serviceman, the parasite.

The bourgeois parties have failed, having been unable to conjure up a moral consciousness or to stand up to the army revolt, leaving the military at liberty to lay the foundations of the current seditious revolt whose failure is due to its lack of a popular base.

Henceforth, if the new Spain is to take shape, it is necessary that every facet of the management of the country be handed over to the workers, and once federalism has been introduced, it is imperative that the workers achieve economic unity through the effective, continuous and trustworthy amalgamation of the two union groupings, the UGT and CNT.

So lofty a concept of individual and collective liberty do we have that we do not seek the success of a proletarian economic policy at the price of the imposition of a dictatorship of the working class.

In Spain, with the economy in the workers’ hands there must be an accentuating of the morality of sacrifice and the sense of individual and collective responsibility. Morality must induce us to brave every hardship, rationing, and longer shifts for the sake of reconstruction, integrity and austerity and every one of us must feel that he is a soldier of a great cause; and all privilege has to be abolished. A sense of responsibility will help us to set aside our selfishness and personal ambition so as to make a contribution to the tasks which are to ensure that all our hopes become reality. This we want and we yield to none in encouraging it in ourselves and others.

Whereas it has not proved possible to eradicate authority absolutely in Spain, its prerogatives are being whittled away by, first of all, federalism and next by man’s being instructed in how to live without anyone’s ordering him to perform his duties, instilling within him a feeling of liberty within the anarchist principles which remain the quintessence of liberalism.

This Spanish proletariat, schooled in such principles and with its personality honed by the realities imposed by the struggle it conducts, will be the one to point the way along which all of the workers of the world must follow in order to win the right to liberty and well-being.’

Resumé published in Boletín de Información, quoted in Peirats, Vol. II, Ch. 20.