5. The Friends of Durruti Group from its Inception up to the May Events

In October 1936, the order militarizing the People’s Militias provoked great discontent among the anarchist militians of the Durruti Column on the Aragon front. Following protracted and bitter arguments, in February 1937 around thirty out of the 1,000 volunteer militians based in the Gelsa sector decided to quit the front and return to the rearguard.[60] The agreement was that militians opposed to militarization would be relieved over a fortnight. These then left the front, taking their weapons with them.

Back in Barcelona, along with other anarchists (advocates of prosecuting and pursuing the July revolution, and opposed to the CNT’s collaboration with the government), the militians from Gelsa decided to form an affinity group, like the many other affinity groups[61] in existence in anarcho-syndicalist circles. And so, the Group was formally launched in March 1937,[62] following a lengthy period of incubation that had lasted for several months, beginning in October 1936. The Steering Committee made the decision to adopt the name “Friends of Durruti Group,” the name being, in part, an invocation of their common origins as former militians in the Durruti Column, and, as Balius was correct in saying, there was no reference intended to Durruti’s thinking, but rather to his heroic death and mythic status in the eyes of the populace.

The Group’s central headquarters was located in the Ramblas, at the junction with the Calle Hospital. The membership of the Group grew remarkably quickly. Somewhere between four thousand and five thousand Group membership cards were issued. One of the essential requirements for Group membership was CNT membership. The growth of the Group was a consequence of anarchist unease with the CNT’s policy of compromise.

The Group was frenetically active and dynamic. Between its formal launch on March 17 and May 3, the Group mounted a number of rallies (in the Poliorama Theater on April 19 and the Goya Theater on May 2), issued several manifestoes and handbills and covered the walls of Barcelona with posters setting out its program.[63] Two points stood out in that program: 1. All power to the working class; and, 2. Democratic workers’, peasants’ and combatants’ organs as the expression of this workers’ power,[64] which was encapsulated in the term Revolutionary Junta.

They also called for the trade unions to take over the economic and political governance of the country completely. And when they talked about trade unions, they meant the CNT unions, not the UGT unions. In fact, some of the members of the Group had quit the UGT in order to affiliate straight away to the CNT, thereby fulfilling the essential prerequisite for membership of the Friends of Durruti.

In reality, although the working class provenance of the Group’s members ensured that they were CNT members, most were members of the FAI, on which basis it can be stated that the Friends of Durruti Group was a group of anarchists which took a stand on purist anarchist doctrine and opposed the collaborationist State-centered policy of the leadership of the CNT and of the FAI proper.

They had the upper hand inside the Foodstuffs Union, which had ramifications all over Catalonia, as well as in the mining areas of Sallent, Suria, Figols, and Cardona, in the Upper Llobregat comarca. They were influential in other unions too, where they were in the minority. Some members belonged to the Control Patrols. But at no time did they constitute a fraction or group, nor did they attempt to infiltrate the Patrols.

We cannot characterize the Group as a comprehensively conscious, organized group that would undertake methodical activity. It was one of many more or less informal anarchist groups formed around certain characteristic affinities. Nor were they good propagandists or theorists, but instead a group of proletarians alive to an instinctive need to confront the CNT’s policy of appeasement and the accelerating process of counterrevolution.

Without question, their most outstanding spokesmen were Jaime Balius and Pablo Ruiz. From March 1937 to May 1937, the Libertarian Youth of Catalonia[65] also set out in their wall newspaper[66] demands similar to those of the Friends of Durruti.

On April 14, 1937, the Group issued a Manifesto[67] in which it set its face against the bourgeois commemoration of the anniversary of the proclamation of the Republic, on the grounds that it was merely a pretext for reinforcing bourgeois institutions and the counterrevolution. Instead of commemoration of the Republic and in opposition to the Generalidad and Luis Companys, which were the cutting edge of bourgeois counterrevolution, the Friends of Durruti proposed commemoration of July 19^th and exhorted the CNT and the FAI to come up with a revolutionary escape route from the dead-end street of the Generalidad government’s crisis. That crisis started on March 4^th with a decree ordering dissolution of the Control Patrols: the CNT’s failure to comply implied the exclusion of CNT personnel from the Generalidad government.

The Manifesto cataloged a host of trespasses against revolutionaries, from the most celebrated case of Maroto, which even drew indignant comment from the docile Solidaridad Obrera, through to lesser known cases, such as the incidents in Olesa de Montserrat. In fact, the Manifesto reiterated the program points which had been incubating since early March in articles by Balius, Mingo and others in La Noche. And these were summed up in the opening paragraph of the Manifesto:

The capitalist State, which suffered a formidable setback in the memorable events of July, is still extant, thanks to the counterrevolutionary endeavor of the petit-bourgeoisie [...]

The Generalidad crisis is categorical evidence that we have to build a new world, wholly dispensing with statist formulas.

It is high time that the legion of petit-bourgeois, shopkeepers and guards was ruthlessly swept aside. There can be no compromise with counterrevolution. [...]

This is a time of life or death for the working class. [...] Let us not hesitate.

The CNT and the FAI, being the organizations that reflect the people’s concerns, must come up with a revolutionary way out of the dead-end street [...] We have the organs that must supplant a State in ruins. The Trade Unions and Municipalities must take charge of economic and social life [...]”

On Sunday April 18, 1937, the Group held a rally in the Poliorama Theater, by way of bringing its existence and its program to the attention of the public.[68] Jaime Balius, Pablo Ruiz (delegate from the Gelsa Group), Francisco Pellicer (a delegate from the Iron Column) and Francisco Carreño (a member of the Durruti Column’s War Committee) all spoke. The meeting was a great success and theIdeasset out by the speakers were roundly applauded.

On the first Sunday in May 1937 (May 2) the Group held a further introductory rally at the Goya Theater: the theater was filled to overflowing and the rally moved those attending to delirious enthusiasm. A documentary film entitled “Nineteenth of July” was screened, reliving the most emotive passages from the revolutionary events of July 19, 1936. The speakers were De Pablo [Could this be Pablo Ruiz?], Jaime Balius, Liberto Callejas and Francisco Carreño. The meeting heard a prediction that an attack upon the workers by the reactionaries was now imminent.

The leadership committees of the CNT and the FAI did not pay undue heed to this new opposition emanating from within the libertarian movement, despite the scathing criticisms directed at themselves. In anarchist circles it was not unusual for groups to bubble to the surface, enjoying a meteoric rise, only to vanish into nothing as quickly as they had arisen.

The program spelled out by the Friends of Durruti prior to May 1937 was characterized by its emphasis upon trade union management of the economy, upon criticism of all the parties and their statist collaborationism, as well as a certain reversion to anarchist doctrinal purity.

The Friends of Durruti set out their program in the poster with which they covered the walls of Barcelona towards the end of April 1937. Those posters which, even then, ahead of the events of May, argued the need to replace the bourgeois Generalidad government of Catalonia with a Revolutionary Junta, stated as follows:[69]

Friends of Durruti Group. To the working class:

1. Immediate establishment of a Revolutionary Junta made up of workers of city and countryside and of combatants.
2. Family wage. Ration cards. Trade union direction of the economy and supervision of distribution.
3. Liquidation of the counterrevolution.
4. Creation of a revolutionary army.
5. Absolute working class control of public order.
6. Steadfast opposition to any armistice.
7. Proletarian justice.
8. Abolition of personnel changes.

Attention, workers: our group is opposed to the continued advance of the counterrevolution. The public order decrees sponsored by Aiguadé are not to be heeded. We insist upon the release of Maroto and other comrades detained.

All power to the working class. All economic power to the unions.

Rather than the Generalidad, a Revolutionary Junta!

The April 1937 poster foreshadowed and explains the leaflet issued during the events in May and incorporates many of the themes and concerns dealt with by Balius in the articles he published in Solidaridad Obrera, La Noche and Ideas (especially revolutionary justice, prisoner exchanges, the need for the rearguard to take the war to heart, etc.). For the first time the need was posited for a Revolutionary Junta to supplant the bourgeois Generalidad government. This Revolutionary Junta[70] was defined as a revolutionary government comprised of workers, peasants and militians.

Most significant of all is the consolidated message of the last three slogans. Replacement of the bourgeois Generalidad government by a Revolutionary Junta appears alongside the watchwords “All power to the working class” and “All economic power to the unions.”[71]

The political program implicit in this poster immediately before the events of May is undoubtedly the most advanced and lucid offered by any of the existing proletarian groups, and makes of the Friends of Durruti Group a revolutionary vanguard of the proletariat of Spain at this critical and crucial juncture as the POUM and the Bolshevik-Leninist Section of Spain were to acknowledge.[72]

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