organised themselves from the ground up, free of ‘upper echelons’, free of parties and university- or central-committee-schooled leadership.
From the infancy of human organisation and the days of cave paintings, a hierarchical arrangement of society has been foisted upon us as the only possible and efficient model. It stands for the rule of the rich white man, with the odd and occasional female gate-crasher to ease and offer diversion from the toil of man. Self-management in Spain, imposed from below, was largely the handiwork of the women, the elderly, the young and the disabled (See Appendix VIII).
And their feats belong to one and all. From the epic of Spartacus through to the day-to-day rejection of capitalism across every continent, the class struggle is replayed on a small scale and, sometimes, on a larger one (as in Ecuador, Bolivia and Argentina since 2001). Such is the ongoing contribution that the battlers have to offer: a past to learn about and be inspired by with an eye to improvisation in today’s world.
Not that the pressures of neo-liberalism and economic crises serve only to fragment the exploited and reduce them to despair and isolation in the face of poverty and police repression. A long way away from Spain, in Argentina, in Patagonia in the south and in the northern reaches close to the border with Bolivia, since 1996–1998, women have been heavily involved in agitation (though the feminists have been largely absent). The unemployed have cordoned off the highways, which, following the collapse of the rail system due to the privatisation policies of neo-liberal Peronista president Carlos Menem, are almost the only means of communication within the country. A national highway, sealed off, promptly creates a breakdown of stocks and the supply chain in every realm: from medicines and foodstuffs to spares in every sector of the economy.
Maybe this had to do with the trail blazed by the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo during the Argentine military dictatorship between 1976 and 1983. Virtually alone in the midst of the raging repression, the Mothers mounted a week-in, week-out silent, unrelenting, peaceful demonstration right in the heart of the federal capital, demanding answers to their questions about the violent, unlawful kidnappings of their sons and husbands. They were and are still a source of inspiration, an approach to be aped, an improvised example to be imitated. Or maybe it was the pre-Columbian tradition of collective mutual aid seen among the Mapuches in southern Argentina or among the Guarani in the north. But the fact is that the picket-lines made up of class-conscious, jobless piqueteros, active alongside their wives and children, with solidarity forthcoming from small producers and businesses, blocked the traffic and eventually secured subsidies and a few jobs. As the tide of privatisation continued in Argentina and with the crisis of 19 and 20 December 2001, the piquetero phenomenon and the attitude of “a plague on all their [those responsible for the crisis] houses” swept the entire country.
In spite of all the pressures and politically motivated bribery, the piquetero movement continues to impact Argentine society. Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis’s documentary The Take, about the collective resistance by the exploited, is a faithful reflection of this (albeit somewhat overtaken by events, given the pace at which Argentine social life moves). Self-management of struggles and a reorganisation of the fabric of society represent the response of the most oppressed to unbridled capitalism. Confronted with the capitalist cult of ‘winning’ and of success for success’s sake—no matter how that success may be achieved and blessed by financial and legal rewards—in Argentina there are groups of individuals who, for their survival, look to the collective, creative daily practices of allotments, roadblocks, bakeries and even schools—eschewing all hierarchy.
Amid the usual blinkered outlook of the ruling class, this vision comes very close to something first spelled out a long time ago: “Our ideal for everybody…is freedom, morality, intelligence and well-being for each through the solidarity of all—the brotherhood of man”.8 The counsel and promises offered by a political leader to the workers and unemployed amount to a hoax: “if, when speaking to them about revolution or, if you prefer, social change, he tells them that political change must come before economic change: or if he denies that they should pursue both simultaneously, or even that the political revolution should be merely the short-term, direct implementation of the complete and utter liquidation of society, they should turn their backs on him, for he is either an out-and-out fool, or a hypocritical exploiter”.9 What we have is not so much short-sightedness on the part of the ruling classes as the mounting of an all-out, unrelenting genocide against the disinherited of the Third World, driven by the First World and with the connivance of Third World rulers. One has only to look at France’s policies towards her erstwhile African possessions. The success of presidents Mitterrand, Chirac and Sarkozy is measured in terms of their implementation of a policy of terror and slow slaughter in those ex-colonies alongside a ‘quiet fascism’ in the metropolis and with Le Monde diplomatique rinsing First World imperialism in ‘criticism-light’. Those who prattle about a different world cannot pretend to endow capitalism with a human face if its very mechanisms and postulates amount to a seed-bed of criminal inequality. The so-called ‘nanny state’ or periods of apparent prosperity for the First World’s lower classes were always bought at the price of ongoing bloody exploitation and the looting of continents that are wide open to exploitation by the multi-nationals.
I was not trained on the basis of some vocation as a professional historian, but rather became one out of the need to clarify and criticise anarchist thought, in France and in Spain alike; I refer to the critical, anarcho-communist (and, later, anarcho-syndicalist) strain of anarchism that I picked up in the Noir et Rouge group. Then again, when I read descriptions of Russian kolkhozes and Chinese communes, I had the impression that I was reading naive texts, or that they were interweaving truth and lies and were bereft of critical capacity. But the same feeling stole over me when I came to read references to the Spanish libertarian collectives by authoritative writers such as Gaston Leval or José Peirats. Such was the depth of conviction of those comrades that they forgot to systematically rehearse the economic advances made.
In 1962, at the Sorbonne, I submitted a thesis in Spanish on collectivisation during the Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939, adopting a resolutely critical approach and shunning triumphalism in my statistical estimates and spelling out potential contradictions between the theory and the practice. A French translation saw publication in 1969. In 1976, further documentation was added and an expanded Spanish edition was published in Madrid in 1977 as La autogestión en la España revolucionaria. In 1999, I produced an overview in French, dispensing with the economic tables and devoting additional space to reflection. In 2006, an updated version was published in Madrid, and a more comprehensive edition in Buenos Aires in 2009.10
At the same time I carried on publishing analysis that recognises no sacred cows by helping with the publication of a Spanish version of Vernon Richards’s Lessons of the Spanish Revolution, by La Hormiga publishers in Paris.11I was able to carry on raising and publicising a number of writings and issues relating to the Spanish libertarian movement and other broader issues by means of essays, anthologies and translations (French editions of writings by Berneri, Malatesta, Kropotkin, Chomsky, Pano Vassilev, the Noir et Rouge review, Max Nettlau, Osvaldo Bayer’s Patagonia rebelde and Bakunin, plus, in Spanish, works by Kropotkin, Bakunin and Anatol Gorelik), with or without recourse to pen names (such as Israël Renof or Martin Zemliak). Pen names were a necessary precaution due to monitoring by the Bulgarian counter-espionage agency (1965–1989), as I’d married a Bulgarian woman, the sister of an anarcho-communist comrade living in France as a political emigré, after fourteen months of (fruitless) search for ‘connections’. Having seen Marxist-leninism and ‘actually existing socialism’ at close quarters,12 as well as having an inside knowledge of European and Latin American capitalism, I was convinced of the economic and social inanity of them both (having seen little improvement for the people between 1950 and 2009).
As
