Grupo 1 de Mayo

At the end of April 1966 Mgr. Marcos Ussia, the ecclesiastical adviser to the Spanish Embassy in the Vatican, disappeared mysteriously while returning from the Embassy to his home in the suburbs of Rome. A few days later the First of May group announced its existence in Rome, while CNT militant Luis Andres Edo, in Madrid, announced simultaneously to the world press that Ussia had been kidnapped to draw attention to the plight of Franco’s prisoners. The results of this action by the revolutionary anarchist movement became an issue of international importance and a central point of discussion in the Italian, French, Swiss, Spanish and Swedish press (the British press avoided it, perhaps for fear of imitative action). When the priest was released unharmed after fifteen days of intensive and fruitless searches by Italian, Swiss, and French police, it proved the efficiency of international anarchist solidarity, and disproved the ‘terrorist’ label put on them by Interpol.

Later, Edo was arrested in Madrid with four other comrades (men and women) accused of preparing to kidnap a high-ranking military officer in the American Army who was based there. Once again the anarchists had brought together in an international struggle the old fight against Franco and the struggle against American imperialism. Now they were re-gouped under the old banners of the ‘First of May’, embodying the traditions of libertarian activism during eighty years of class struggle against capitalism. The struggle for workers’ councils and direct workers’ control, in opposition to slogans of nationalism, nationalization and reform, had always been associated with the First of May Movement. Now that struggle was backed up by sharp, decisive actions against particular forms of class repression.

Though the ‘counter-culture’ and ‘alternative society’ coming from the youth revolution in America had really nothing to do with revolutionary anarchism, yet it contained within itself strongly revolutionary elements and the anarchist movement became transformed, as gradually new and old revolutionaries united together finding their own level. This was impelled further by the Vietnam War and its world-wide consequences of protest movements, and the rise of such groups as the Weathermen in the United States which greatly influenced the ‘alternative society’ movement in Europe, and especially in Greece and Turkey, where for the first time in fifty years a libertarian movement arose among the youth, divided between Anarchists and Marxist-Leninists, but struggling against the despotic regimes of those countries up to a point where the regime in Turkey was obliged to maintain a sort of permanent civil war against young workers and students, and that in Greece to use all the methods of Nazi rule learned by the police during the war.

In many countries, the growth of the vaguely ‘libertarian left’ inclined towards Blanquism or perhaps anarchism, with Marxist phraseology, continued—though as orthodox Maoist movements rose, the movement was impelled away from its ‘Maoist’ inclinations. This movement took a strong part in the fight for civil rights and for workers control, and against the tyranny of the state. To the press, inevitably far more uninformed than the public if presumed to serve, all this was the ‘anarchist movement’ and the revolutionary activist wing at that; a supposition encouraged by Tory propaganda which sought to present the anarchists as ‘bogeymen’ just as the Left, for that matter, tried to use the fascists for the same purpose.

In 1967 and 1968 revolutionary activism showed its hand again. Attacks were made on the offices of American civil and military centers throughout Europe and on the embassies of the Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, Bolivian and Uruguayan Governments (among others). Following these simultaneous actions in Britain, France, Germany, Holland, Switzerland and Italy, the First of May Group and the International Solidarity Movement issued a manifesto calling on all revolutionaries to practice an effective solidarity with all victims of the class struggle. The struggle began again in Turkey, with the formation of cells composed of both Anarchists and Marxists in a struggle against the military dictatorship. I’Express (Parisian weekly) foresaw that ‘Anarchists will prepare a hot summer’ and reported in March 1968 on the activities of what they described as ‘extreme left wing organizations in Europe’, prepared by their German and Dutch correspondents. The situationist movement, and the provo movement in Holland, were linked together with the libertarian left and the Anarchist revolutionary activists. And indeed, two months later, anarchism reappeared once more as the dynamic force it is.

The events of Paris—with the participation in it by Anarchists, Maoists, Trotskyists, Situationists and others—are well known. And the First of May Group began attacks on Iberia Airlines in defense of Spanish political prisoners. Concerted attacks affirmed international solidarity with them. While the International Solidarity Movement both directly and indirectly helped the appearance of more active groups in France, Britain, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Turkey and Greece. Groups which more or less independently continued the activist struggle in their own country against the steady progression of the State towards dictatorship, while stepping into other countries to help that struggle attain greater intensity. There were numerous acts in all these countries, those in Britain including a bomb attack on the Home Secretary’s house on the day of national protest against the Industrial Relations Bill; an attack on a Minister who had defended the idea of bourgeois attacks upon strikers during the electricity dispute, attacks on Ford’s and on the mechanized dossiers of Scotland Yard at Tintagel House, on the Italian, Spanish and American embassies, on recruiting offices and military barracks, on Spanish banks, and on Government buildings, some of which incidents were labeled as (and all labeled by the police as) coming from the Angry Brigade, though this was not a specific organization, but a manifestation of revolutionary activism through a wide circle of the libertarian movement generally.

The existence of the Anarchist activist groups encouraged a wide section of the revolutionary left, not explicitly anarchist but certainly libertarian, to step up the struggle and shake themselves free of the nonresistance elements. Though all such revolutionary attempts have been particularly scrupulous in their respect for human life during the whole of the decade, and have avoided innocent victims entirely the campaign of repression against the libertarian movement has (outside Spain) been unequaled since the days of Nazism. The activities of Nationalist groups, with which they have nothing in common, and which by their nature could not be so scrupulous, have been maliciously ascribed to them.

This has been the case in Italy, Germany, Turkey and Greece and even in Great Britain where forms of restraint over the police are believed to exist.

The Anarchist Black Cross, as offering a legitimate means of expression for the anarchist revolutionary activists, has been particularly the object of attack. In Milan, Giuseppe Pinelli, militant anarchist, ex-member of the wartime Resistance and secretary of the Italian ABC, was arrested following a Fascist bomb in Milan and thrown from a police station window during interrogation; in Germany, a policy of extermination carried out by the German police against the Red Army Fraction, composed of Marxists and ‘Anarcho-Marxists’, was extended to shoot down in the street members of the Black Cross, including Georg von Rauch and Thomas Weis-becker. Then Stuart Christie, secretary and co-founder, was arrested in London charged with the activities of the Angry Brigade together with a number of comrades, men and Women, who represented a wide section of the libertarian left and a wide variety of interests (all being describe by press and prosecution as Anarchists, though this only applied to some). This led to the longest and most costly trial in recent judicial history in England, ending in ten years each for four of the accused, with four being acquitted (and preceded by 15 years under another, but notoriously reactionary judge, and an acquittal).

In Scotland, savage sentences were passed on members of the Scottish Workers Party, a Maoist organization. These examples are only the more spectacular testimonies of bourgeois, social democratic and fascist repression against revolutionary anarchist, libertarian activism and revolutionary forms of Marxism too, but such persecution has not and will not achieve its object because the idea of international solidarity is growing by leaps and bounds. Even in Turkey, where the most obscene forms of torture are being used against the young revolutionaries, and in Spain, where torture and death are commonplace, the idea of workers councils and the affirmation that the fight for the occupation of the places of work will be backed by activist groups continues to flourish.

The struggle is not on the other side of the world. It exists in the countries dominated by State capitalism and State Communism as well as in the capitalist and fascist countries. It is not only in the ‘third world’ or the undeveloped part of the world. The call for revolution has gone through Europe. Never again will it lie down before the attacks of fascists, vigilantes or secret police. It is not even confined to one revolutionary ideology. It is not a conspiracy. It is a movement that may prove to be irresistible.