1945–1960

With the rise of the new Left and the collapse of Stalinism from its near-monopoly position among working class militants, there was a proliferation of Marxist groups. Some of these managed to ensure that there was carried over into a new generation, though purged of the Stalinist taint, the same mistakes of the Communist Party and the same subordination to political leadership, but even more than previously they substituted the cult of Nationalism for that of any form of socialism and thus managed to avoid the most important issue, class struggle. This nationalist cult, expressed in Marxist phraseology, has characterized the new left ever since.

But despite the many struggles for national liberation which have over-clouded the issue since the 1950s, the real conflict has no longer been between state communism and fascism nor between democracy and fascism nor, as the propagandists now put it, between democracy and communism (or New Democracy and capitalism). It was between the rulers of the world with increasingly common interests and the people themselves. Because of this Anarchism has come to the fore once more, even though (ironically) just as in the thirties anarchist action was interpreted in the light of the clash between communism and fascism, now communist and nationalist (if not exactly fascist) action began to be interpreted by the media in the light of essentially anarchist struggle against world imperialism and centralized government.

This rise in anarchist activism spread far beyond the influence of the small corps of anarchist activists who had to struggle from the grip of pacifist nonresistance on the one hand, and the nonresistance of the ‘dominant figures’ of the Spanish libertarians in exile on the other, who tried to divert the struggle by appeals to the United Nations and invocations of old war-time slogans as well as cold war ones, in an attempt to find a ‘diplomatic solution’ that would enable them to regain their lost ministerial portfolios. For these people and others like them the ‘justice’ of the armed struggle against Franco ended, in effect, when it ceased to be legal, and from 1945 onwards the Resistance fought without their help, and often, against their wishes.

But as the Spanish activists found common cause with the new generation inside Spain, so did all the small anarchist groups throughout Europe find that they were no longer isolated and aging groups of militants; on the contrary, while the anti-nuclear movement, based on pacifist techniques, brought in temporarily hundreds who appeared to be anarchists (but were basically liberals who found liberalism meaningless, yet who saw anarchism as merely a personal revolution, which is to say liberalism) yet of those some came right through to a revolutionary position and those who did became a majority in the movement, which overnight became completely rejuvenated and the more effective.

But as the revolutionary anarchist groups became effective, and came to integrate internationally, the Marxist movements became effective by disintegration. The Trotskyist movement broke into a dozen clearly defined sects; the pretext of ‘Maoism’ meant a large number of opposing doctrines, from the true ‘Maoist’ Stalinist anti-revisionism to the most ultrarevolutionary stands. Blanquism, though unacknowledged flourished more than it had ever done; Spartacism, and the ideas of council communism, were once more effective. The challenge to Moscow hegemony meant the proliferation of groups and theories, all part and parcel of the New Left.

Some of the new militants, encountering not the effective anarchist groups and thinking of them as the exception to the rule when they were in fact the rule itself, saw with distaste the ‘retired militancy’ of the bureaucratic relics or the nonresistance of the ‘new’ movement, and went their own way. Either they formed new anarchist groups not in touch with the other revolutionary anarchist groups—and therefore intended sometimes to borrow slogans or package-deal attitudes from the rest of the new Left for want of having concretized their own philosophy—or they disclaimed the name altogether and preferred the more neutral ‘libertarian’ ‘libertarian left’ or even, in some countries, ‘Maoist’, though the Maoists explicitly disowned them, or ‘Anarcho-Marxist’. Many of these groups, especially in Germany where the tradition of council-communism was strong, moved to a strongly libertarian position. Labeled ‘anarchist’ by the Press, they contained both Anarchists, sometimes using Marxist labels (later discarded) and New Left Marxists. This was the origin of such movements as the ‘Red Army Fraction’ whose development (later labeled ‘Baader-Meinhoff Gang’) terrified the German bourgeoisie but made apparent the class nature of German society and shattered the idyllic postwar German capitalist ‘dream’.

In Spain, the urban guerrilla groups (Sabate and Facerias were already well known) sparked off a new wave of resistance in 1951 when a General Strike in Barcelona initiated a mass resistance movement following the passenger boycott of the tramway company in the city. Apart from building up sufficient capital to finance sabotage operations and ‘attentats’ against well known persons of the Franco regime, the aim of the libertarian action groups was to maintain a spirit of resistance to the government and in this they were successful for a time. But in spite of the intensity and heroism of their struggle, the Brigada Politico-social (Special Branch) was able to carry out a policy of extermination against the libertarian movement in Spain. It cooperated with the ‘democratic’ police forces beyond the Pyrenees and the fact that the Spanish libertarian movement had worked closely with Allied Intelligence during the war left it in a position to be betrayed afterwards in the interests of ‘stable’ government. What was worse, perhaps, was the apathy and lack of solidarity from anti-Franco forces in general. The level of conflict came to a standstill for a time, activity being confined to more sporadic and individual attacks in industrial Catalonia.

During the repression, militants of the CNT and activists of the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI) were murdered in the streets, or in their own homes, by the Spanish police. Hundreds of others received long prison sentences and a number are in prison to this very day. The libertarian movement had to reconsider its strategy in the light of the new repressive wave in Spain. Not only was it faced with the almost total disarticulation of the action groups of the interior, but, more discouraging still, the Franco Government was gaining by leaps and bounds in the fields of international diplomacy. In the years between 1951 and 1960 the Anarchist movement in Spain became more introverted and lethargic. It expended its energies, in exile, in a less physically dangerous but far more destructive way—engaging in polemics and mutual accusation of incompetence thrown across the Congress Halls and meeting places of the numerous committees of exile.

During this period, the ‘nuclear disarmament’ movement was attracting large numbers to the New left and beyond it, to an anarchist position. The new activists had already shown their willingness to participate in the struggle. The ball was at the feet of the anarchist movement, but the revolutionary anarchist movement was too scattered and isolated to be able to kick it, and did not always appreciate what potentialities lay before it.