Notes

People :

Author : Agustín Guillamón

Text :

[122] In 1939 Eduardo Maurico came up with a very similar critique of the Friends of Durruti’s program:
For such groups [groups such as the Friends of Durruti] the root of all evil had been the abandonment of ‘principles’ by the leadership. A reversion to ‘wholesome principles’, a return to ‘purity’, ‘a fresh start’ — that in its entirety was the program and the rallying cry of these factions. Now, starting afresh is an utter impossibility. There is more likely to be a reenactment of history. There can be no return to the situation prior to July 19: but the same mistakes can be made in similar circumstances. The biggest mistake that these factions today can make is to fail to draw all of the lessons evident in the Spanish Revolution, all in the name of ‘purity of principles.’ That initial mistake would induce them sooner or later to make the same mistakes and compromises which today they are against. And the primary consequence of the Spanish Revolution is that the compromises by the Garcia Olivers and the Cipriano Meras were not due to the abandonment of the CNT’s traditional ‘apoliticism,’ but were down to that ‘apoliticism’ itself, that is, to the lack of a revolutionary theory, in the absence of which revolution is impossible. (Lenin)
[O. Emem “Situación revoluciónaria. El poder. El partido.” in ¡Experience españole. Faits et documents No. 2, Paris, August 1939]

[123] There were two rival Trotskyist groups in existence in Spain during the civil war: the Bolshevik-Leninist Section led by Munis and the “Le Soviet” group led by “Fosco.” We make no references here to “Le Soviet” because it had no dealings with the Friends of Durruti. For this reason we use the term Trotskyist as a synonym for militants of the Bolshevik-Leninist Section.

[124] For the “Communist Union Manifesto” as an historiographical error see: Agustin Guillamón “El Manifiesto de Unión Commuistda: un repetido error en la historiografia sobre la guerra civil” in La História i el Joves historiadors catalans, Pónencies i Comunicacions de les Primeres Jornades de Joves Historiadors Calalans, celeblades els dies 4, 5 i 6 d’octubre de 1984 (Edicións La Magrana Barcelona 1986) and Paul Sharkey The Friends of Durruti. A Chronology (Editorial Crisol, Tokyo May 1984)

[125] On this point we are in agreement with Paul Sharkey.

[126] See Munis’s article in No. 2 of La Voz Leninista (August 23, 1937) entitled “La Junta revolucionaria y los ‘Amigos de Durruti’,” wherein Munis analyzes the concept of revolutionary junta championed by the Group in No. 6 of El Amigo del Pueblo (August 12, 1937).

[127] In his letter to Bolloten written from Cuernavaca and dated June 20, 1946 Balius stated:
The alleged influence of the POUM or the Trotskyists upon us is untrue. You will appreciate that the Group of us CNT comrades who headed the Group knew perfectly well what we wanted. We were not newcomers to the revolutionary lists. Consequently, all of the claims that have been tossed around are utterly unfounded.
By my reckoning what I have said should be enough. You may describe the Friends of Durruti Group as an attempt by a group of CNT militants to rescue it from the morass in which it found itself and at the same time to salvage the Spanish revolution which had been menaced from the outset by counterrevolutionary forces which the CNT in its naiveté had failed to eliminate. Especially in Catalonia, where no one could have challenged our supremacy.
In a letter from Hyéres (France) to Paul Sharkey, on September 7, 1974, Balius himself stressed the independence of the Group, confirming the complete absence of contacts between the Friends of Durruti and the Trotskyists and the POUM, prior to May 1937: “We had no contact with the POUM, nor with the Trotskyists, but there was some mixing on the streets, with rifles in hand.”

[128] Jaime Balius “Por los fueros de la verdad” in Le Combat syndicaliste of September 2, 1971.

[129] La Voz Leninista No. 2, Barcelona, August 23, 1937.

[130] In Barcelona the POUM’s left was represented by Cell 72, and more specifically by its secretary Josep Rebull, the administrator of La Batalla and the Editorial Marxista. Josep Rebull had drafted a counter-proposition in anticipation of the convening of the POUM’s second congress, at which he delivered a radical critique of the political policy pursued by the POUM Executive Committee.

[131] Reprinted with the permission of The Houghton Library (Harvard University).

[132] Reprinted with the permission of The Houghton Library (Harvard University).

[133] The leaflet from the Bolshevik-Leninist Section distributed on May 4, 1937 (reconstituted from the facsimile published in Lutte ouvriere No. 48, of June 10, 1937) reads:
Long live the revolutionary offensive! No compromises. Disarm the GNR [Republican National Guard] and the reactionary Assault Guards. This is a crucial juncture. It will be too late next time. General Strike in every industry not working for the war effort until such time as the reactionary government steps down. Proletarian power alone can guarantee military victory. Complete arming of the working class. Long live the CNT-FAI-POUM unity of action! Long live the Revolutionary Front of the Proletariat. Revolutionary Defense Committees in the workshops, factories, barricades, etc....”

[134] Munis offered a very lively criticism of the ambiguity and indecision of the so-called POUM left in Barcelona, in the form of Cell 72, which, at the beginning of 1938, would dwindle to its secretary Josep Rebull and no one else: see Grandizo Munis “Carta a un obrero poumista. Ia Bandera de la IV Internaciónal es la única bandera de la revolución proletaria” in La Voz Leninista No. 3, of February 5, 1938.

[135] In La Voz Leninista No. 2 (23 August 1937), Munis made a critique of the notion of the “revolutionary junta” set out in No. 6 of El Amigo del Pueblo (August 12, 1937). In Munis’s view, the Friends of Durruti suffered from a progressive theoretical decline and a practical inability to influence the CNT, which led them to abandon some positions which the May experience had enabled them to occupy. Munis noted that in May 1937 the Friends of Durruti had issued the call for a “revolutionary junta” alongside “all power to the proletariat”: whereas in No. 6 of El Amigo del Pueblo (August 12, 1937) the slogan “revolutionary junta” was invoked as an alternative to the “failure of all Statist forms.” According to Munis, this represented a theoretical retreat from the Friends of Durruti’s assimilation of the May experiences, taking them further away from the marxist notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and drawing them back into the ambiguities of the anarchist theory of the State.

[136] Reproduced in Pierre Broué Léon Trotsky. La revolución española (1930–1940) Vol. II, pp. 405409.

[137] José Peirats El movimiento libertarion en España (1) José Peirats Colección de Histórid Oral, Fundación Salvador Segui, Madrid, undated.

[138] José Peirats La CNT en la revolución española three volumes. (Ruedo Ibérico, Paris, 1971). In this, the official history of the CNT, Peirats hardly mentions the Friends of Durruti.

[139] Unpublished interview given to Agustin Guillamón by Josep Rebull, as cited previously.

[140] Jordi Arquer História de la fundació ... op. cit.

[141] In the affidavit taken from Manuel Fernandez (“Munis”) by a magistrate and used as part of the book of evidence in the Espionage and High Treason Tribunal of Catalonia versus the militants of the Bolshevik-Leninist Section of Spain, we read: “Questioned as to which anarchist groups the Bolshevik-Leninist Section, of which the deponent [“Munis”] was the general secretary, was in cahoots with, he states: That they were in cahoots with no one, since, had he been, it would have been with persons who had stopped being anarchists in order to join the Bolshevik-Leninist Section, adding that they used to send the clandestine press they published to some persons who belonged to the ‘Friends of Durruti’, as well as to UGT and CNT personnel too.”

[142] As is recorded in the report of the search of Baldomero Palau’s printworks, a report taken by the magistrate drafting the indictment against the Trotskyist militants: “In Barcelona, at 8.30 A.M. on the fourteenth of February nineteen hundred and thirty eight, officers [...] acting on instructions from above, and carrying a search warrant [...] arrived at No. 241, Calle Salmerón, a printworks, in order to effect a scrupulous search, in that it appeared that it was being used for the printing of clandestine publications, in some of which the lawfully constituted government was being attacked.
Once there and in the presence of the Manager of the presses, namely Baldomero Palau Millan, who lives on the premises in the Calle de Cera [...] they proceeded to carry out the order, the upshot being that three printer’s “mastheads” were found: these, when copies were taken from them turned out as follows: one was the mast-head from El Amigo del Pueblo, having in the right hand margin, boxed, writing which stated ‘The Public Entertainments clash, which has been resolved happily, was a provocation by Comorera. While our comrades fight at the front, this wretch is busily torpedoing the rearguard. The unity of these workers has frustrated his designs” [text taken from No. 12 of El Amigo del Pueblo of February 1, 1938]: another, from La Voz Leninista and a third from El Amigo del Pueblo: all of which were seized by the duty officers for transmission to their Superiors.”

[143] See G, Munis’s letter of October 2, 1948 from Paris:
During the May events, the B-L Section contacted the Friends of Durruti, but nothing was coordinated, for practical reasons and also — I imagine although I cannot be certain — because the Friends of Durruti thought they might lose popularity in the CNT if the leadership of the latter were to accuse them of allying themselves with marxists. After the May events there was more friendliness and interaction between the two groups. The influence of both inside the CNT grew considerably. Generally speaking, it was members of the latter who were most involved in distributing El Amigo del Pueblo and La Voz Leninista.”

[144] Munis and Balius, who had never met before May 1937, subsequently struck up a comradely relationship, based on mutual appreciation and respect, ideologically and personally. This friendship flourished in exile in Mexico, since Balius lived in Munis’s home for a time, according to Arquer.

[145] According to Arquer [letter to Bolloten dated 16 July 1971, deposited with the Hoover Institution] the Friends of Durruti were a passing eruption which at one point articulated the deepest feelings of the CNT membership in Catalonia, and, had the anarchists succeeded that tendency might well have consolidated itself and grown, but once defeated, they lost all influence and their leaders came within an ace of expulsion.

[146] The degree of familiarity and day to day friendly relations between Federica Montseny and the Russian ambassador, Rosenberg, defies belief, and the assistance and fillip which Abad de Santillán attempted to afford a discredited Companys likewise defies imagination. The sublime saintliness of the anarchist leaders accounts for the ease with which they were manipulated. By way of an example of what we are saying, see Frederica Montseny’s own declarations (in Agusti Pons Converses amb Frederica Montseny: Frederica Montseny, sindicalisme i acrácia [Laia, Barcelona, 1977, pp. 169–170]):
Before setting off for Russia, having been recalled, Ambassador Rosenberg who had become my friend — called to see me [...] [I] was staying at the Metropol, which was the seat of the Russian embassy. I was to be one of the last government figures to arrive in Valencia, when the government, in view of the military situation, resolved to move there from Madrid. Neither the Ministry of Health nor myself, who held that portfolio, could find anywhere to settle in. Everywhere was occupied. Until, eventually, the Russians very kindly turned over to me one of the floors of the hotel which had been turned into their embassy. Many a time I found a bouquet of red carnations in my room. But the flowers were only an excuse for rummaging around the whole room.
But the following excerpt from Frederica Montseny’s letter, dated Toulouse May 31, 1950, to Burnett Bolloten, strikes us as even more revealing:
Rosenberg very kindly offered me two rooms in the Hotel Metropol [in December 1936, in Valencia] which was occupied by the Soviet Embassy and its personnel. I reckon that his intention must have been to keep me continually under his influence. I accepted, after consultation with Vazquez, who had just been appointed secretary of our National Committee, and I moved into the Metropol. I ate in the Hotel dining room, mingling with the Russian officials, and, very often, in the Ambassador’s personal quarters. Virtually every night, he would invite me in for coffee. There I met Marty, Gallo, Kleber, Blucher, Tito [?] and Gorev, whom I had met before in Madrid. And very often I saw, or my secretary who was nosier or less discreet than me, saw Alvarez del Vayo, Garcia Oliver and López coming and going from Rosenberg’s quarters. Occasionally, Mariano R. Vázquez was invited along with me, passing many a long hour in lazy conversation, drinking cup after cup of coffee or tea.
See also the testimony of Abad de Santillán, from the FAI’s Peninsular Committee: “We were none too pleased with the power for which the Militias Committee stood and could impose. There was a government, there was the Generalidad and we would have liked the thousands of problems and gripes and demands brought to us every day to have been heard and resolved by the lawful government, which was not recognized by the broad masses. During some casual get together, we invited President Companys to attend so that people might get used to regarding him as a friend of ours, whom they could trust.” [Diego Abad de Santillán Alfonso XIII, la II Republica, Francisco Franco (Juúcar, Madrid, 1979, p. 349)]

[147] Letter from Balius to Burnett Bolloten, dated Cuernavaca July 13, 1946.

[148] According to Pablo Ruiz’s claims in “Elogio póstumo de Jaime Balius,” in Le Combat syndicaliste/Solidaridad Obrera of January 9, 1981.

[149] See the articles in which the FAI moved that the Friends of Durruti be expelled, in Boletin de información y orientación orgánica del Comite peninsular de la Federación Anarquista Iberica, like “La desautorización de la entidad ‘Amigos de Durruti”’ in No. 1, Barcelona, May 20, 1937, and “La sanción publica a los inteurantes de la agrupación Los Amigos de Durruti” in No. 3, June 6, 1937.

[150] Andres Nin “Ante el peligro contrarrevoluciónario ha llegado la hora de actuar” in La Batalla of March 4, 1937.

[151] See Munis’s article on the Friends of Durruti in La Voz Leninista No. 2, August 23, 1937, entitled “La junta revoluciónaria y los ‘Amigos de Durruti.’”

[152] The description ‘authoritarian,’ a term of abuse among libertarians, was not, however, a product of CNT propaganda, since one of the most significant of the Group’s theoretical advances was its assertion of the authoritarian, or totalitarian character of any revolution. This is an assertion which the Friends of Durruti reiterated on several occasions. It was first made in an article which Balius published on December 6, 1936, under the title “El testamento de Durruti,” and was placed in Durruti’s mouth in the course of his harangue from the Madrid front on November 5, 1936: and the last mention was in the 1978 introduction to the English language edition of the pamphlet Towards a Fresh Revolution, which reads thus:
In that booklet back in 1938, we said that all revolutions are totalitarian.

[153] Spanish historiography on the civil war has turned from being militant history written by protagonists and eyewitnesses of the civil war, with all of the dangers implicit in that, but also the irreplaceable passion of someone who does not gamble with words because previously he gambled with his very life, into inane academic history written by ninnies and characterized by nonsense, incomprehension and indeed contempt for the militants and organizations of the workers’ movement. Still, there are a few honorable exceptions — among them the lines of inquiry opened up by Vilanova, Monjo and Vega, which we might describe as an academic history that fulfills its function, and requires the addition of no further qualifying term.

From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.

Chronology :

January 23, 2021 : Notes -- Added.

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