1960–1966

On January fifth, 1960, Francisco Sabate (el Quico, sometimes wrongly described as Sabater) one of the most tenacious and best known of the libertarian activists, was killed in the village of San Celoni (near Barcelona) following a gun battle with over 100 Guardia Civil the previous day, when four comrades from his group had been ambushed and killed in a Pyrenean farmhouse. Sabate, though badly wounded, managed to escape and make his way to San Celoni by hi-jacking a train, but he was recognized and brought down by the crossfire of a police patrol.

The death of this man, who symbolized for many the whole of the Spanish Resistance, helped to inspire the formation of the new resistance groups, and also helped to re-unite the scattered forms of revolutionary anarchist activism, who now realized that they must break decisively from the nonresistance wings and align themselves internationally with other revolutionary activists. The Spanish resistants in the interior realized that they could not rely on the Toulouse faction whose sole purpose was to divide them from their real allies, the international anarchist movement. Sabate’s death thus marked the end of an era of introspection and apathy, and the beginning of a new internationally coordinated revolutionary activist struggle against imperialism in all its manifestations.

The reluctance of revolutionary anarchism to cut itself off from totally ossified groupings or those who, using the label ‘anarchist’ had no longer any libertarian or revolutionary interests, may seem curious to the outsider; but was born a long tradition within the anarchist movement to accept anyone as an anarchist who happened to call himself one (something long since impossible for socialists, or Marxists), and in the absence of a party organization, this acceptance alone defined an anarchist movement. But it was always a dangerous tradition (it meant that someone well known for being an anarchist, though having no longer any connection with the movement, could ‘speak’ for something of which he was not a spokesman, one disastrous example being Peter Kropotkin, a member of no anarchist organization at the time, apologizing for World War II and causing as much harm to the revolutionary movement as if he had indeed been its delegate).

The death of Sabate, however, which was heralded in the Spanish press as the end of Spanish Anarchism, and which provoked the usual hypocritical disclaimers from Toulouse, meant that the Spanish movement of the interior decisively broke from Toulouse. Though still using the name ‘CNT’ to denote the type of union organization which they wished to build up, it was clearly understood that they were not referring to the Organization in Exile (MLE) but did not wish to confuse the workers as a whole. (And they also clung to the wish not to appear to be ‘schismatic’.) However, within one month of Sabate’s death the Revolutionary Directorate of Iberian Liberation (DRIL) announced its existence, and immediately obtained support from this anarchist movement of the Spanish interior as well as of other groupings. It made a number of daring attacks on the dictatorships of both Spain and Portugal, such as the hi-jacking by a commando of Spanish and Portuguese and South-American fighters on the liner Santa Maria on the high seas on January 21st 1961. The possibilities of a two-fold struggle opened up once more — the vanguard of workers’ councils, now being established by the anarchist movement of the interior—(FOI — Federacion Obrera Iberica, Workers Iberian Federation—the ‘internal’ name of the groupings ‘pro CNT’) and this rearguard of armed fighters who used such action where they could strike best.

Faced with this ‘problem’ the CNT in exile tried to reunify in 1961, giving up the attempts to reconcile revolutionary resistance with futile moves to find a ‘diplomatic solution’ to something which international capitalism and world diplomacy had solved to its own satisfaction. But it was now too late, and finally the organization was doomed to sink into sterility, with counter-excommunications of the old guard of the bureaucracy.

Elsewhere in the world were the still somewhat isolated ‘sectarian’ groups of anarchist revolutionaries; the expanding movement that was coming via the nuclear disarmament movement, and the ‘anarcho-Marxist’ movements growing up quite independently, moving from Marxism but bringing many Marxist attitudes, especially those of ‘third world’ nationalism, with them.

Yet the coming together of the first of these sections with the Spanish activists soon surprised the world, since it apparently seemed that international anarchist activity had emerged from the blue like the kraken wakening after years of sleep. Moreover, although the international activists had no connections with, and usually a strong dislike for, the ‘hippie’ and ‘new left’, nevertheless the latter did afford them a pool in which to swim. Their ideas were able to be heard for the first time by a larger audience.

Sympathy for their actions had never been lacking by a very much wider section of the public than the press ever imagined, and press distortions and hysteria notwithstanding, there was a deep underlying support for anarchist ideas in working class circles and among people of all generations. All this led to the setting up of a secret organization the DI (Internal Defense) which brought together comrades with years of activity in every part of the world to co-ordinate their clandestine activities against tyranny—in the early spring of 1962 and within a few months surprised the world by the apparently sudden reemergence of international revolutionary anarchist activity after years of ignorance of its existence.

But only when the ‘near miss’, on Franco’s life at San Sebastian (August 1962) took place did the international collaboration come to general notice, partly because this had also the effect of making an inroad by the libertarian movement on the Basque country. For long Basque nationalism had been reactionary, nationalist and clerical. Now it was as discredited as most of the inactive movements of the Republic in exile. The ETA was the new, dynamic Basque movement, and while it was to some extent nationalistic, it also contained many who were not, and could embrace nationalists, marxists, catholics and libertarians in a common struggle against Franco. As a result of the terror against the Basques, Franco had succeeded in uniting almost the whole Basque country against him, irrespective of whether it had nationalist aspirations or not. It also signaled a new wave of repression which swept Spain directed particularly against the miners of the Asturian coalfields and the libertarian activists. Feeling itself endangered by the rise in revolutionary consciousness and activity the Franco Government returned to the use of terror perfected in the years immediately following the Civil War.

Now, however, international action, concerted for the first time, was able to answer the repression within Spain. The Councils of War sent thirty libertarians to prison with savage sentences, and for one of them the State Prosecutor demanded the death penalty. Support for Jorge Cunill Vals, the young anarchist sentenced to death, grew throughout the world, and in Milan the Spanish Vice-consul was kidnapped by Italian anarchists (on September 29,1962). Cardinal Montini (now Pope) intervened on behalf of the condemned Catalan Anarchist, and the rebuff he received has caused the tension which exists between the Vatican and the Prado to this day (and is why the Church is now backing more than one side in the fight for the succession). On this occasion, however, Franco had to stay his hand and remit the sentence.

The following year Julian Grimau and the anarchists Delgado and Granados were sentenced to death but protests against the executions were so widespread that Franco’s hopes of admission into the common Market were totally frustrated. Governments of the Western World were unable to flagrantly go against what were widespread sentiments by admitting Franco (the Governments of Eastern Europe had, of course, no such inhibitions, and could do trade deals whenever they wished without regard for public opinion which did not exist in their countries). However, without admitting it to the general public, and sometimes illegally, the police of Western Europe were working in close association with Franco though it was not until ten years afterwards that this was generally admitted. This police activity was excused in France by the fact that, as Franco had clamped down on the French OAS operating against De Gaulle from Madrid, they should clamp down on the Spanish Anarchists in France operating against General Franco (though it was often politically inexpedient for police who had collaborated with the Nazis to clamp down openly on libertarians who had been to the fore-front of the Resistance). In England no excuse existed, and in fact the issue of Gibraltar meant that Special Branch was in fact acting against British imperial interests by its assistance to Franco whose staged demonstrations for Gibraltar were solely destined to deflect public attention from the Resistance criticisms of his regime. Nevertheless, Scotland Yard was able to supply ‘secret information to a foreign power’ feeling that in time (as it did) government opinion would see that police interests against revolution were higher than such narrow nationalistic interests.

It was therefore possible for concerted police action to be taken against French, Italian and British anarchists working in conjunction with the revolutionary youth movement in Spain, demonstrating the international nature both of Anarchism and the Police. This led to the arrest of Scottish anarchist Stuart Christie in Spain, where he was taking part in an attempt to assassinate the dictator. World opinion was directed to Spanish prisons and in particular the material support which he began to receive was diverted by him to libertarian prisoners in general. For a long time the Communist Party had, under a variety of anti-fascist and democractic sounding names, been collecting aid for Spanish prisoners from all; but giving only to their ‘own’ — thus other prisoners came to be forgotten, with a corresponding dampener upon the resistance movement. The anarchists not only had been receiving the longest sentences and been the subject of the bitterest persecution, but the communists, who engaged only in propaganda activities extolling the glories of Russia, and advocating an alliance with the Christian-Democrats against American bases in Spain, were the only ones to receive aid in jail. Now at last that situation was reversed, irrevocably, a direct consequence of Christie’s arrest. His arrest, and that of other ‘foreigners’, also helped to cement the international alliance that finally broke down the barrier that had been erected by the ossified and nonresistant wings of the movement.

In 1965 the Libertarian Youth Movement broke completely and finally with the main anarchist and confederal organizations in exile. The reason for this was the refusal by the National Committee of the CNT to implement the decisions agreed on in 1961 to renew the clandestine armed struggle against the Franco regime. This unwillingness to act may have been due to tiredness, fear or perhaps not wishing to compromise the steady comfortable existence they were leading in exile. However, with the break finalized the revolutionary anarchist activist movement was now able to break free from the fetters which had bound it for so long its association with the movement in exile.