It's Easy to Attack: A Sharpening of the Anarchist Struggle
rise like lions - 07.12.2010 23:11
Background
After the death of Franco and the transition from fascism to democracy, the anarchist movement in Catalunya swelled up again to proportions unseen since the Civil War. It was clear that the anarchists, centered around the CNT, enjoyed a great popular legitimacy, and hundreds of thousands of people came to their first rallies. But this was quickly stamped out by police repression and squandered by the position of social irrelevance chosen by the organization itself. The interests of organizational survival had made the CNT even more conservative in the long and delicate years of exile, so when they were able to operate openly again in Spain they missed the importance of the moment and set out on a path of legal syndicalism (which in the days of Franco constituted a direct challenge to the system but now was just a recuperation of the struggle). Lacking the ability to speak to the depth of the problems of work and government but also lacking the institutional backing the more moderate unions had, the Organization and its followers quickly declined, even within workplace struggles, although not before they fought some important battles in that terrain. Because of the type of fight they had chosen, their essential weapon was not social presence, effective attack, or contagious ideas, but numbers, and as they lost those numbers they could not sustain the fight and their workplace victories were quickly forgotten as they lost their relevance to workers, and as Capital became less concentrated and jobs more precarious with the closing down of factories and the boom of the tourism-fueled economy.
During the years of dictatorship, a second current had broken away and set off on an insurrectionary path, mirroring the young pistoleros who defied the older syndicalists in the ’20s and began agitating and preparing for armed struggle, eventually creating the FAI and making the July 1936 revolution possible (one must also mention the contribution of the more moderate syndicalists, who may not have known how to defeat the Fascists in armed struggle but did know how to take over the running of their industries).
This second current of the ’60s and ’70s, concentrated in the anarchist youth group Juventudes Libertarias or the anti-authoritarian/extreme Left MIL, carried out propaganda and clandestine attacks against the Franco regime.
The inheritors of this more combative tradition of Iberian anarchism increased their distance from the syndicalists after the CNT’s backpedaling around the Scala affair in ’78. They were progressively disowned by the Organization and began to feel alienated from the social centers and ateneos associated with the CNT, where they had once found refuge. They found their place, instead, in la okupación, the squatters movement that began to flourish in Spain later in the ’80s. Here a new generation of anarchists came into the struggle, which was no longer for society or for the commons, but for the defense of their own autonomous spaces. The greatest strength of the CNT—its insistence on being present in the problems and realities faced by lower class members of society—was discarded along with all its weaknesses, and replaced with an ethic of hazlo tu mismo, “Do-It-Yourself.”
At the end of the ’90s and beginning of the ’00s, illegalist and insurrectionist thinking, primarily from Italy, made great waves in the new anarchist movement and established a theoretical standard. This development led to a tactical escalation that was both unsustainable and ill timed, though in other ways it brought fresh air and a new sense of confidence to the movement. Spectacular attacks, such as the letter bombing campaign around 2004 in support of the FIES prisoners, attacks whose only real audience were the government officials targeted and the media, which were expected to spread the news, became considered as the forefront of a struggle that had no popular base nor much in the way of efforts to connect to one.
Simultaneously, the post-fascist police throughout the Spanish state, and in Catalunya in particular, were democratizing. Catalunya’s new mossos d’escuadra learned crowd control and political policing in the UK, Germany, and Israel. They would no longer repeat the provocative scenes of brutality regularly enacted by the Guardia Civil, at least not so often. The new efficiency of the police, coupled with a Giuliani-style social reengineering of Barcelona on the basis of public messaging and minute social ordinances, led to a marked decline of popular violence. A city that had once been known for its riots along with the likes of Berlin had in the period of a few years become a laughingstock among European anarchists. Thus, the professional violence of the anonymous anarchist bombers no longer had a complement in the public realm, and became cut off from the social reality. In other words, as opportunities to participate in public acts of violence against the system, such as riots or rowdy protests, became less frequent and less accessible, other more directed forms of violence such as the bombings made sense to fewer and fewer people, meaning that the pool of future participants, sympathizers, and prisoner supporters was drying up, leaving the fish exposed, flopping about in the air and easy to scoop up. And this is exactly what happened: in several major cases, people who had participated in bombings and other attacks were apprehended and imprisoned, and subsequently anarchists who were more vocal or active in supporting the prisoners were framed and imprisoned.
Needless to say, even these isolated actions soon disappeared. The combative part of the anarchist movement had become so pacified by 2006 that when the squat scene, which housed most of those anarchists, was threatened with a serious wave of evictions, many predicted it would be unable to defend itself and would disappear too within a couple of years. Sections of the squatters set off permanently down the path of reformism and housing rights.
After much blistering criticism and self-abasement, most of which was formulaic and devoid of content, projectuality, or constructive proposals, recently some small signs began to appear that the anarchists have produced and spread some good critiques of their weaknesses and begun to recover their power to attack the system and influence society (the third necessary motion, the one that creates autonomous space, had long been and still was their strong suit). If this trend continues it would be promising indeed, because few anarchist movements have succeeded in reversing the gains democratization has brought to the engineers of social control. And it would be nice to remind ourselves, and not only in romanticized places like Greece, that history is not unidirectional.
Here are a few texts translated from Spanish or Catalan, as well as reports about some of the actions that reflect these ideas being put into practice.
 Website: http://riselikelions.info/articles/6/it-s-easy-to-attack-a-sharpening-of-the-anarchist-struggle-in-barcelona
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