ABSTRACT

This thought, so exact in its foresight, was written by Helmut Rudiger, in May 1937, while his Spanish anarcho-syndicalist comrades were still trying to digest the bitter lessons of that month’s events. Barely six months earlier, four CNT leaders had, for the first time in history, entered government, after having vainly tried all the possible alternatives. In spite of what was later said, this abandonment of their opposition to conventional politics, the anti-politicism that was one of the anarchist movement’s identity marks, was not the cause of chain of disasters which befell it from the moment it took that fateful step. It might be argued that the price that the CNT had to pay for a few seats in the government far outweighed the meagre benefit gained through this collaboration. However, this is not what the majority of its leaders were weighing up in November 1936. Rather, once it became clear that this was a war and not a revolutionary carnival, it was, for them, a case of not leaving the mechanisms of state control in the hands of the other political organisations. It is true that some took longer than others to grasp this. However, there were very few illustrious names who advocated rejecting collaboration. The activists of the FAI and the ‘treintistas’ of old were now united in the struggle to obtain the support necessary to put their new political convictions into practice. Those who did not support them and took different routes ended up dead, or defeated on the barricades raised on the streets of Barcelona in May 1937, after having been marginalised from the centres of decision-making.