Indians in the Family: A People’s Journey

This past year as part of a personal search into my family’s indigenous roots I “interviewed” relatives, in Mexico City and in Texas, and asked them about our ancestry. I read several history and anthropology books about Mexican indigenous peoples. I also visited sites and museums explaining Indigenous civilization. One of the most impressive was the Museum of the Central Aztec Temple in Mexico City, the Museo del Templo Mayor. I recommend a visit to this site, which has some of the most beautiful pieces of art and accounts of the Aztec civilization, including the origin story involving the deities Coyolxauhqui and Huitzilopochtli.

My uncle in Mexico, my mother’s brother, told me that, at least on his side of the family, our forebears were Gran Chichimeca tribal people, from what are now the states of Aguascalientes and Zacatecas in central Mexico. He prefaced his comments by saying that after traveling throughout the length and breadth of Mexico three times, he had come to the conclusion that we were “from the most savage, most primitive, most barbaric Indians–the Gran Chichimeca “. My uncle laughed as he said this, expressing his underlying feelings of embarrassment and internalized oppression. (I later read that the term chichimeca actually did mean “dirty uncivilized dog” in the Nahua language).

Thirty years after the Spaniards invaded and took over Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital in 1521, they started a second conflict. The discovery of silver north of Mexico City compelled them to move soldiers and settlers into a new area, coming up against the Chichimeca people. A very violent 50 years-long frontier war began, with the Spanish setting up mining outposts and the Natives resisting and holding on to their lands, their way of life. Apparently these Indians fought hard and fiercely and with great determination so as to not be subdued. The geographical location of the Gran Chichimeca—what is now Zacatecas-Aguascalientes—strongly suggests that they might be my family’s ancestors. For nearly 400 years indigenous groups were moved around and relocated and migrated throughout the land but if we have a homeland this region is it.

 For many years my brother has been very deliberate about investigating our indigenous roots as Chicanos, looking into our family’s connections with tribal peoples. He told me that because of our build and physical features on my father’s side of the family, we could be descended from Navajo, Apache or Comanche people, who are from what is now the US Southwest. He speculates that we’re descendents of individuals who were captured and enslaved, then taken to work the silver mines to the south, in Mexico. This might explain the connections between my mother and father’s sides of the family who were from the same region in Mexico.

 A book I read this past year, Guillermo Bonfil-Batalla’s “El Mexico Profundo: Reclaiming a Civilization”, 1987, explained some things I had long suspected and that other Native thinkers had argued. (In the 1970’s a native American professor, Jack D. Forbes, held that Mexicanos/Chicanos are de-tribalized, “Hispanicized”, acculturated Indigenous peoples. He called us genizaros, Indians with Spanish names, language and religion).

 Bonfil-Batalla reports that Indigenous people in Mexico have been there a long, long time.  “According to the information available, human beings have been living in Mexico for at least thirty-thousand years.” P.4

 Starting about 5,000 years ago or so those peoples built the societies and cultures that we now know as Mexican. And they spread that civilization all over the mountains, deserts, jungles, plains, and shores of a vast area.

 “There are hardly any virgin landscapes in Mexico. One always finds evidence of human presence, of the ancient passing of others over these lands.” P. 10

What I think is the most interesting about his writings is a core conclusion, that ethnically, culturally and spiritually Mexicans are an indigenous society.

According to Bonfil-Batalla,

“It is common to say that Mexico is a mestizo country both biologically and culturally. In terms of physical features, the mixture can be seen in large sectors of the population, although the intensity varies and Indian traits predominate in many groups. This can be attributed in the first place to the size of the original Indian population, which was much larger than the European, African, and other groups that participated in the racial fusion…

“It is evident that the Indian genetic contribution was the fundamental one in the physical makeup of the Mexican population. This is an undeniable reality…that racial fusion did not occur in a uniform fashion and that we are far from being the racial democracy that is often proclaimed…” P. 15-16

 The Mexican people—and this means Chicanos too—are basically Indigenous in our ethnicity, our ways of life, our day-to-day attitudes, spirituality and practices. “Mestizo” actually means Indigenous with an overlay of Catholicism, Spanish language and Westernized confusion.

Bonfil-Batalla also describes what we call internalized oppression and how it got laid on us. This is very valuable information because it gives a historical context for our situation as Chicanos. 

“The recent history of Mexico, that of the last five hundred years, is the story of permanent confrontation between those attempting to direct the country toward the path of Western civilization and those, rooted in Mesoamerican ways of life, who resist. The first plan arrived with the European invaders but was not abandoned with independence. The new groups in power, first the creoles and later the mestizos, never renounced the westernization plan. They still have not renounced it.

“…The final accomplishment of the colonization, when the colonized finally accepted internally the inferiority that the colonizers attributed to them, renounced their own identity, and assumed another and different one.” p. 20

This confusion, this sense of being less-than, or feeling despair or whatever negative, unhappy attitudes we shoulder, is cultural contagion, the imposition of oppressive patterns on a people and the “acceptance” of those patterns by the targeted group.

 De-Indianization has been achieved when, ideologically, the population stops considering itself Indian, even though the life way may continue as before. Such communities are now Indian without knowing that they are Indian.” P. 46

Bonfil-Batalla was very clear that even with the terrible assaults on Indigenous peoples the basic, underlying cultural basis is too strong for the westernizing plan to win completely; however, as we know, the price paid for resisting was lots and lots of oppression and suffering and confusion. He was optimistic that the peoples would reclaim and reinvigorate their ways of life. (He died before the Chiapas Zapatista uprising of 1994, a moment when that resistance came out very starkly.)

 “The peoples of the Mexico profundo continually create and reinforce their own, private sphere of control. They take foreign cultural elements and put them at their service; they cyclically perform the collective acts that are a way of expressing and renewing their own identity. They remain silent or they rebel, according to strategies refined by centuries of resistance.” P. Xvii

Bonfil-Batalla recognized that to be Indian can mean many things, including being urban and “modern”. His ideas about what it means to be a present day Mexican/Chicano people brings out what is at stake for our individual and collective future and survival. To be Indigenous in the 21^st century is to be part of the present day reality…without losing yourself to the oppressive culture. For example, Mexico City, with its 28 million residents is a huge Indian metropolis.

In this case one must suppose that the only true Indian is one who is illiterate and miserably poor, and who does not speak Spanish or employ Western rationality. Anyone who does these things ceases to be Indian. Can there be a clearer example of the persistence of colonial ideology?” p. 147

Finally, Mexican customs, food and language, the cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the day of the dead, our attachment to family, our sociability and “clannishness”, our art and music and poetry, respect for elders and modesty, our seemingly “self-defeating” resistance to Anglo-European ways, our confusion and questioning of the system, all these are signs of our not giving up who we are.

“…All these forms of resistance are really facets of the same permanent, tenacious struggle. Each community and all of them in conjunction have fought to continue being themselves, not to give up being the protagonists of their own history.” P. Xix

In Re-evaluation Co-counseling it is believed that we can and will discharge our hurts completely, reclaiming our identities, healing our families and communities.

 

Remembering a Friend

REFLECTIONS ON ELENA

I’ve asked my dear brother Gil to read this letter to those of you attending this memorial.
Antes de todo, les doy el pesame a los padres de Elena. Les mando un fuerte abrazo de cariño y de dolor
compartido. Y les pido que me perdonen el no haber podido venir a esta reunion de amigos y familia para hacer homenaje a Elena.
Tambien a sus papas quiero expresarles un profundo agradecimiento por haber traido su hija a nuestras vidas. Como se puede ver fue una persona de gran Corazon y Espiritu quien tuvo un gran impacto en
su entorno, supo ganarse muchos amigos y queridos de todas partes del mundo. Indudablemente esto tiene que
ver con el modo de ser de la familia Castañeda. Ahora, gracias a nuestra hermana Elena, nosotros tambien
somos sus hijos, formamos parte de su familia.

I met Elena in the early 1990s when I was in graduate school at Berkeley. We hung out together, laughed and laughed and laughed, and got to really love each other. I have memories of camping with her and Gil, of eating and partying, and hanging out at her place near the university.

For me, Elena was a very welcoming Chicana sister from Chicago; a brown, beautiful, strong, Mexican Indian
carnala, with jet-black hair and a big, wide toothy grin. I remember being impressed with how tough and resourceful she was. An independent woman, she was sanding and finishing floors at that time, getting herself together to go back to school.

I know that her life was not without pain and, without disclosing things shared in counseling sessions, she carried the loss of her brother and the reality of being away from her parents which was a source of constant doubt and reflection. I recall that a recurring question for her was: should I stay in Berkeley or return to be with my parents in Chicago? We talked all the time about relationships, about work, about politics.
And as for politics, so important a topic in Berkeley and in the Bay Area, she was sharp, sharp, sharp. She was crystal clear and way ahead of the times in terms of environmental and health and gender politics and the Chicano/Indigenous movement. Mr. and Mrs. Castañeda, you may realize this already but Elena was a very advanced and deep woman politically, spiritually, intellectually. For me personally, it was natural that she and I, as prietos and Indios, had an affinity, a love for each other. Of course we had to find each other. She became my sister and I her brother.

Elena was no slouch as a thinker. A searcher, a free spirit, she was an excellent Counselor. And she was a hard worker, a class-conscious person and generous to a fault.
One more thing: there was a side to her personality that made it impossible for us not to click, something guaranteed to draw us together, and that was her jokester side.
Anybody who spent time with her soon found out how goofy, humorous, cheerful, upbeat, lighthearted and silly she could be. I was often the victim of her wit and wisecracks and merciless teasing.
I loved her because she was as irreverent as hell and I will forever miss her risa loca, really the laugh of an eternal young girl who loves life.
Did our joking verge on bad taste? You better believe it. That type of deadly humor was how we coped with this harsh, irrational society with its senselessness and injustices.

Years later, after I had moved away, I returned for a visit and we reconnected. We hung out for a few hours in Emeryville and then said goodbye at a café on Dwight and San Pablo. Gray haired now and with more years under our belts, the youthful Elena was ever present. Her vibrancy, vitality and playfulness never stopped shining. That was about a year ago.

So now, carnalita de la piel morena y los ojos chinos, you’re gone. Since I have a hard time believing in an afterlife, what I’ll do is hang on to the memories of your rich laughter and your smiling Indian eyes and your un-breakable human spirit. Those memories can never be taken away.

I close with a cautionary reminder, that
Linda G. has the right idea: we need to hang out, make the time to visit friends while we still have each other. Otherwise we remain with our regrets of not having checked in enough, not having said enough, not having spent the time. Don’t put it off too long, for the Fates have a way of messing with us when we delay and procrastinate. We need to stay connected with one another.

from West Harlem in New York City,
un abrazote,
Andrés Mares Muro

OPENING ADDRESS GIVEN AT 1ST HARLEM TENANTS CONVENTION, JUNE 1, 2007

Welcome to everyone tonight to this very important event: the First Harlem Tenants’ Convention.
Fausto, one of the organizers for this weekend event put together by the Mirabal Sisters Cultural and Community Center, was telling me today that there are daily more and more cases of people being evicted in our neighborhood.
He talked about how the landlords have no respect for some basic social values and no qualms about throwing elderly people and kids out into the street.
In school I learned that in other times and places people had some basic human rights that were respected. For example in England and France in the 17th & 18th centuries the townships had to guarantee its citizens who were unemployed food and shelter. They set aside monies to care for everyone in the village.
Those values are gone now. Someone once remarked that the number one law of the capitalist economic system is “you OR I, not you AND I”.
There’s a big gap between the brutal, heartless profit orientation of the for-profit system we live under and Human Rights.
Housing, economic security, education, healthcare are some of the values that are presently threatened.
One of our members, Epifania, said it clearly at one of our meetings: we are living under a roof that’s not guaranteed or secure.
In the history of New York City there have been politicians who fought for the people.
Fiorello LaGuardia was one, a populist mayor from the 1930’s who fought for the people, for immigrants, for workers. He tried to solve the problems of affordable housing and social security.
Rent control and rent stabilization came out of that period.
But now we tenants are alone. We have nobody under this current administration really fighting on our behalf. Manhattan is turning into an playground and enclave for yuppies and the present city government is completely in favor of it.
The landlords and developers we face are powerful. They have financial power and laws in their favor and the most of the politicians and they are organized.
Their gentrification plans to remove working people from their neighborhoods can only be resisted when we organize and unite.
We have to count on ourselves on our efforts, our organizing. This weekend is an important part of that effort. We are the majority of this city.
Our challenges:
1) to bring in young adults with families that are just starting out.
2) make solidarity links with other tenant groups throughout the city—East Harlem, the Bronx, other neighborhoods in Manhattan, Brooklyn

THANK YOU FOR BEING HERE THIS WEEKEND AND KEEP FIGHTING FOR WHATS RIGHT.

Statement written for the Fellowship of Reconciliation, March/April 1999

Toward the Beloved Community F.O.R.’s Racial and Economic Justice Vision Statement by Andrés Mares Muro

Rini Templeton

Humanity today faces an enormous challenge: bringing about racial and economic justice. Throughout the world, claims of prosperity and economic well-being are contradicted by the increasing income insecurity with which the majority of people must contend. Institutional racism is still the norm, systematically deferring the hopes of millions who aspire to participate fully and equally in all facets of social life. People of faith and conscience must build movements which effectively challenge the legitimacy of such an economic and racial order. Nonviolent activists must propose changes which address the roots of the problems, help to dismantle the oppressive systems, and bring us closer to fulfilling Dr. King’s vision of the Beloved Community.

A Dire Moral Situation The widespread greed and consumption of our culture are symptomatic of a deep social illness: many folks are trying to fill the emptiness of their lives with pleasure, property, and power when only kindness, compassion, and service to others can fulfill us. Dr. King identified materialism, violence, and racism as the “giant triplets” destroying our nation. Social justice movements, while rightly scrutinizing Pentagon expenditures, hesitate in challenging the core values of private ownership and possessive individualism. Change is viewed solely within the context and the logic of the present economic rules. Yet is a system which puts profits before people a life-sustaining system, or is it ultimately at odds with the integrity of human beings and the well-being of the planet? The question before all of us remains: is our present economic system compatible with justice? The market system promotes extreme income differences, social inequality, and separateness, and perpetuates age-old hierarchical distinctions even though all are supposedly “created equal.” Income disparities reinforce divisions along ethnic, gender, and age lines (people of color, women, and youth and the elderly are generally poorer). More and more we find that full citizenship, and even the acknowledgment of one’s essential humanity, depend upon the amount of money at one’s disposal. A person receives full entitlement only by possessing the means with which to consume products: without means of support one is a non-citizen, a ghost. Income and class status mean increased life chances for some, diminished opportunities for others; some enjoy wide horizons while the great global majority face, in the words of theologian Jon Sobrino,”early and unjust deaths.” The morality of the present economy is highly questionable: the permeability of the cash system continually yields “dirty money.” While government looks away, revenue is generated by “legitimate” evils such as the alcohol and tobacco industries, the arms trade, and illegal economic activities such as manufacturing sweatshops, child labor, prostitution, and drug cartels. As “laundered” money circulates, it mixes with regular banking and financial enterprises and the overall economy.

A Search for Solutions In a period which presents new social conditions and where activism is not as widespread as in the recent past, groups around the country are proposing several strategies in order to bring about justice. These are not full-fledged solutions, merely critical and necessary first steps which will take us closer to the Beloved Community envisioned by Dr. King.

• Recognize and celebrate the values that give life meaning, those Cornel West calls “non-market values”: kindness, compassion, love, care, and service to others.
• Promote an “Economic Bill of Rights” which would guarantee work, a living wage, housing, health care, child care, recreation, sufficient food, and clean air. Stress the importance of the natural dignity and rights of all human beings by making economic justice a human rights issue.
• Support “Living Wage” campaigns, which seek to raise pay to meet the actual cost of living. Likewise, set limits on astronomically high executive pay. Build a national awareness of the need for income fairness.
• Tax extremes of individual wealth. Social movements advocate lifting up the poorer classes, but don’t challenge the existence of elite economic or social classes. It is immoral for humanity to be divided into economic ranks.
• Promote a national dialogue on economic democracy, with working people and the poor in the lead. Wage-earners of all kinds should have a voice in the struggle for social change. The question of how to bring about economic justice is not on the national political agenda, nor in mainstream discussions, and until recently has been neglected by the established leadership of the labor movement, the traditional defender of wage-earners.
• Heighten awareness of corporate welfare. Expose the ways in which government supports powerful business interests through tax loopholes and subsidies. Emphasize the need for corporate responsibility toward workers, communities, and the environment.
• Support labor in its efforts to organize. Endorse campaigns which seek to expose and eradicate exploitative sweatshop conditions.
• Empower people of color and other marginalized groups. Speak out against hate crimes. Defend affirmative action laws.
• Defend immigrants from scapegoating by nativists and racists. Educate citizens as to the human rights of immigrants and the contributions which they make to society.
• Advocate for youth power; ensure that young people have the resources and quality education which they need to exercise their creativity, intelligence, and zest for life.
• Work to “reduce the rates of imprisonment in the US, which are now the highest in the world and disproportionately entrap people of color. We need to oppose the current prison-building binge, to develop alternatives to incarceration that are also consistent with public safety, and to fund preventive programs like public service employment, drug and alcohol treatment programs, and education and training.” (Bonnie Block, Fellowship, Jul/Aug 1997)
• Support the call for “definitive cancellation of the crushing international debt where countries burdened with high levels of human need and environmental distress are unable to meet the basic needs of their people or achieve a level of sustainable development that ensures a decent quality of life.” (Jubilee 2000/USA Platform, 199

Where Do We Go From Here? Consistent with our vision and life of active nonviolence, FOR’s Racial and Economic Justice Program raises the following goals for ethnic and economic justice:

• Meaningful work at a living wage;
• Enough income to provide adequate food, clothing, medicine, recreation for every person;
• A decent home for every human being;
• Recognition of the value of unpaid labor at home;
• Universal health care;
• Quality education for all;
• Protection from economic fears due to old age, youth, sickness, accident, or unemployment;
• Quality child care for all families;
• Cancellation of the international debt.

In 1998, exactly thirty years after the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., and fifty years after the death of Mahatma Gandhi, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution calling for an “International Decade for a Culture of Peace and Non-Violence for the Children of the World (2001-2010).” The adoption of this initiative coincided with and complements the fiftieth anniversary commemoration of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We have lived to see the Gandhian and Kingian visions take a central position on the world stage, even though the fulfillment of those ideals is still to come. In the spirit of the UN International Decade, FOR pledges itself to building a People’s Campaign of Nonviolence which will seek to usher in the Beloved Community, where ethnic and economic justice is the norm. The People’s Campaign will bring together those who are now voiceless and unrepresented and who desire a just and peaceful society. Understanding the need for spiritual and moral self-renewal, FOR proposes a ten-year campaign to revitalize and unify these communities. The gap between the shrinking groups of owners of economic-financial monopolies and the growing populations of those who sell themselves for their meal ticket grows wider and wider. We are committed to building a popular nonviolent movement from below which will move society in the direction of economic democracy and transform the old conflictive roles into relations of cooperation and fellowship. We are aware of the need for a revolution in our consciousness if we are to turn toward new ways of living with each other. Our vision of the future embraces the entire human family. We know that the unjust international imbalances which are now viewed as normal will one day be seen as barbaric and cruel. We must see to it that, just as in the nineteenth century chattel slavery was ended throughout most of the world, so too in the future, racial and economic injustice will be abolished. Progress has been rolled back time and again when oppressive practices resurface under new governments. Bloody revolutions often end up betraying their original ideals, resulting in renewed oppression of the masses of people and the loss of hard-won gains. As Gandhi tried to show, means and ends are interrelated so that a nonviolent goal is undermined by violent means. We call for a radical nonviolent revolution where our hopes for social justice are realized without force, without bloodshed, and in the spirit of uniting people from every background, every nation, and every faith, in a new type of society. The Fellowship of Reconciliation calls upon people of all faith traditions, nations, ethnicities, and perspectives to unite in devotion to nonviolence, inclusion, and compassion; to work together for racial and economic justice, replacing exploitation with fairness, greed with service to others, hatred with reconciliation, and violence with peace.

In defense of the Seattle rebels (Or nurturing one’s inner anarchist) [December 1999]

December 9, 1999

“The ugliness in the afternoon”

A couple of us from the national offices of the Fellowship of Reconciliation went to Seattle to participate in the protests against the World Trade Organization ministerial Summit. We visited with Western Washington FOR folks with whom we co-sponsored an event on the Global War System. For the four full days we were there we practically lived in the streets, marching in peaceful demonstrations, attending educational fora and assemblies, as well as facing tear gas attacks, anti-riot police pursuit on foot, and dealing with the threat of being arrested, getting hit by rubber pellets, riot sticks, or pepper spray. By mid-day on November 30^th, the first day of the WTO meeting, it became clear that police, while arresting demonstrators, were mostly intent on dispersing people with force and weapons. That evening a state of emergency was declared with a 7pm curfew; as night approached armed National Guard soldiers dressed in fatigues were rolled in. Most have seen media images of the street actions that night and the following days. There has been a universal condemnation of the destructive acts of black clad youth who trashed businesses in the 15 to 20 square block downtown area. The WTO, business people, government officials, and the TV and print media, from the Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer to national dailies like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, all excoriated the rioters, describing them as criminals, hooligans, thugs. And progressive activists—clergy, environmentalists, unions—lined up in a similar chorus. “We certainly don’t support violence or property destruction,” said Naomi Walker, a spokeswoman for John Sweeney, the head of the AFL-CIO. Carl Pope, Executive Director of the Sierra Club: “…We deplore the violence exhibited in downtown Seattle, and it is usurping the real story of 50,000 people who stood together to demand respect for workers and the environment…Violence only obscures our message. A handful of anarchists should not drown out the message of thousands of peaceful marchers.” Others were more vehement in their feelings towards the “violence” against property: Medea Benjamin, a leader with Global Exchange, a San Francisco based group said,“Here we are protecting Nike, McDonald’s, the Gap and all the while I’m thinking, ‘Where are the police? These anarchists should have been arrested,’” (New York Times, December 2, 1999). Mike Dolan of Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen joined in with these observations: “…These nonviolent direct actions were early disrupted and corrupted by small bands of vandals who turned over some newspaper boxes and apparently smashed a couple of windows downtown. The police failed to identify and arrest these few anti-social individuals…Why didn’t the police identify and arrest the vandals early on? If they had, the ugliness in the afternoon and my own substantial discomfort would have been avoided. We didn’t come to trash Seattle, we came here to expose the trashy reputation of the WTO.” (World Trade Observer, Dec.1,1999). In the days since there have been further accusations and speculations as to the anarchists being government agent provocateurs. Will no one defend the anarchists? Were their actions as reprehensible and anti-social as their critics claim? Or are these young rebels our brothers and sisters, not saboteurs of the movement but revolutionary spirits who we should embrace for their willingness to express a righteous anger and repudiation of a social order based on greed, systemic violence and oppression of a global majority?

Mass civil disobedience as a new stage of struggle can transmute the deep rage of the ghetto into a constructive and creative force. To dislocate the functioning of a city without destroying it can be more effective than a riot because it can be longer-lasting, costly to the larger society, but not wantonly destructive. Finally, it is a device of social action that is more difficult for the government to quell by superior force. –Dr. Martin Luther King, “Where do we go from here?”  

There were three major groupings and accompanying actions in the Seattle protests, constituencies and events which overlapped.One was a huge coalition of labor, peace activists, environmentalists and church and religious folks. These groups made up the bulk of the protesters, especially on the day of labor’s officially sanctioned march when some 30,000 plus participants walked down from Seattle Center to the downtown area near the WTO meeting site. Prominent among the unions were the International Longshore Workers, Service Employees Industrial Union, and Steelworkers.Secondly, there was the Direct Action Network (DAN) with far fewer people, a mostly young crowd, but with the mission of going from symbolic protest to nonviolently gumming up the ministerial works, that is, monkey wrenching the WTO.Lastly, there was the small core of anarchists, reportedly from Oregon, who’s aim was to assault the sacred cow of American corporate culture. Because at this point in history no citizens group can actually directly affect the decision-making of the powerful and mighty, nearly everyone in the political movements relies to a certain extent upon symbolism as the expression of protest. The rich and the powerful pull the strings while we bear witness and issue JeremiadsYet while one large grouping in Seattle was for the symbolism of moral protest, of dissent and policy disapproval (labor, churches, the fair traders, the enviros), and while another was for the symbolism inherent in actually interrupting the ministerial wrong doers with nonviolent civil disobedience (even if only for a day), the anarchists were about the symbolism of confronting and challenging capitalism first hand, the economy based on profit-making and run by multinational corporations. Theirs was a call for countercultural change, for radically altering our very way of life. They seek this partly by destroying oppressive symbols, the corporate logo. Their watchword is direct action versus solely symbolic gestures of dissent. In a sense, their rhetoric anticipates the society captured by the title of David Korten’s latest book, “the Post-Corporate world: Life After Capitalism”.This is why groups of committed anarchists in affinity groups went for the retail shopping mall, for Nike Town, the Radisson, Sheraton, Starbucks, the Gap, FAO Schwarz-Barbie Center, McDonalds, the places where commodities are displayed and sold, the sites where we all participate in the culture of consumption (unfortunately the Microsoft campus was far away on the other side of Lake Washington). I’ll remember for a long time to come a drizzling December afternoon in downtown Seattle, close to the Pike Place market, getting tear gassed  and chased by the police moments after having been read the riot act. Scary and terrifying and yet exhilarating, it was a moment when average people held the streets, reclaiming public space for hours—normally, most urban space is run by commercial interests or the state but for a few days in Seattle it was contested ground, the res publica. Thanks to DAN and the anarchists, democracy was in the streets. Were the anarchists in Seattle ultra-extremist adventurers endangering the success of the anti-WTO protests or were they prophets? Quite arguably their actions defined the outer parameters of the anti-WTO week in Seattle.For many years the peace and justice and religious based movements have issued pronouncements calling for social justice and rejecting materialism and greed, statements against the soullessness of consumer society and for equitable human relations. These are prophetic claims. It could be argued that the secular anarchists took these pronouncements to heart, making literal assaults on the sites of consumerism and alienated living, direct acts against the commodity culture. Ironically, their practice, their actions, jibe with a repudiation of consumerism, materialism, the valuing of things over people, the marketplace as God. That nearly everyone else disavows the attacks on property, some even calling for the state to arrest rebellious youth, is revealing, suggesting an agreement or consensus on the sanctity of corporate property (Some critics of the rebels even devoted themselves to cleaning up the graffiti left on the storefronts).The anarchists went beyond the liberal call for reforming capitalism a-la-Clinton; acting as maximalists, they made a symbolic bid for a total, not a partial change. The anti-corporate symbolism prefigures the future many of us want: one with no more exploitation in both the south and northern hemispheres, without concentrated economic power, without CEO’s or bosses, without classes or wage slavery, and environmentally rational. Theirs is a criticism against not just of the WTO or the reigning governments but of the system of markets and profit-making as a whole. For many of us their symbolism was more appealing than the “legitimate” protests; their imagination grander than the reforming of one corporate entity or blocking the proceedings of one bad institution. Young, daring, courageous, pure, almost beautiful in their sinister black garb, the anarchist youth took their gamble without asking for any help or even solidarity from the rest of us (on the contrary, they are universally reproached).  They brought to mind the spirit of theWatts rebellion of 1965, the Detroit fires of ’67, Paris and Chicago ’68, South Central Los Angeles ’92, and, also of course, the widespread disapproval these earlier street actions also garnered.The Seattle anarchists raise certain questions for pacifists which could be couched in this way: when Civil Rights desegregationists broke Jim Crow laws which many Southerners revered or believed in fervently, were they being anti-social? When anti-Vietnam war resisters spilled blood on government documents such as selective service records or when they burnt draft cards, were these actions violent? When peacemakers take a hammer to a warhead of a nuclear missile, is this vandalism or thuggery? Should we condemn the destruction of an outlet for a corporate chain such as Starbucks, Nike, the Gap, etc.? Are we implicitly supporting an unjust international economic arrangement based on super-exploitation abroad and exploitation at home by calling for the arrests of anti-authoritarian youths?  

Methods and Motivations  There was marked contrast between the atmosphere and attitude at the established peace churches in downtown Seattle and the DAN gathering point at Capitol Hill, between the middle-aged, middle-class “reasonable, practical” voices—unions, churches, peace movement, environmentalists, etc.—and the anarchic (self-directed, autonomous) groups of youth defying the procedures of the WTO, private property and social proprieties (upon which unjust orders rest). To its credit the Direct Action Network skillfully employed a tactic of interrupting business as usual by breaking with the safe choreography of orchestrated or pre-arranged protests sanctioned by the powers that be, the officially approved etiquette of routinized protests. The actions were refreshing, invigorating, insofar as they subverted the usual types of demos where often everything’s worked out with the police chief down to the last busload of arrestees. The inadequacy of mainstream pacifist response to the police brutality was illustrated by a particularly disappointing scene which unfolded on Wednesday morning at Seneca and Fifth streets on the day after the major street actions. A silent religious procession which stopped just opposite the phalanx of police came across as acquiescent, if not submissive. Perhaps this is all we can do at this time…yet, maybe those of us who are more invested in the system, more “institutional”, can still support the actions of youth willing to confront core systemic values. It may be that our organizational commitments to things such as the 501C3 status, stock porfolios, endowment funding, mortgages, internal hierarchical structures, and the like may prevent us from acting directly on behalf of justice; it may not necessarily compel us to hold back from supporting those who are ready to take on the struggle more militantly. Ultimately, the demonstrations belonged exclusively to neither the peacemakers, environmentalists, labor unions, the religious OR the anarchists—no one has a copyright or monopoly on the streets. In Seattle there was lots of organization but minimal orchestration, or pre-programmed ritual; there was no predictable outcome to the moments when protesters held the line. Public Citizen put out the call to come to Seattle to protest the WTO but it was the masses of people acting on their own, spontaneously, who opened up the public spaces for real. At certain points it seemed that there were no official leaders only crowds. 

In the final analysis there are only three ways of effecting social change: through persuasion of the men who hold power in the existing system, through a conspiratorial coup d’etat, or through the open mobilization of the people against the prevailing order. The first is the technique of liberals, the second of one type of anarchist, the third of most other radicals.—Sidney Lens, “Radicalism in America” 

And to the anarchists—Is rioting all you can do? Is this your sole tactic and method? Are you a “one trick” pony?On the night that of the trashing of the Starbucks on Stewart street one of thousands of arguments between individuals was heard. A woman carpenter, wearing her hardhat and boots, decried the store bashing. “That store could’ve been one I built! All of Seattle was built by labor!” Seattle is as unionist a town as they come. In 1919 some 60,000 workers went out on a general strike over labor rights, bringing everything to a standstill. It was also the site for big battles with Boeing corporation. In the future, if the movement is able to build and grow, it’ll take the mighty arm of organized labor to make a real revolution against corporate capital, not just the street actions of a minority opinion within a minority counterculture. The riddle is how to make that equation change.Can you be anarchists of the Spanish type, the 1930’s National Confederation of Labor of Catalonia, or America’s own Industrial Workers of the World, who were inextricably involved with wage workers? (“Labor is entitled to the value it creates-Abolish wage slavery”—IWW slogan seen in the big march) It’s necessary to explain your actions more, the whys to your actions.The challenge to the anarchists (actually to all of us) is how you make your message legible to average folk. If you hold no dialogue with others and do no or little outreach to average working people, you will be beating your arms helplessly against the walls of our common prison.

Finally, RACE MATTERS.Like the rest of the Seattle protests, the direct action and anarchist contingents were mostly white, pointing out yet again the polarized state of the progressive movements. It’s clear to me that if the participants in the battle of Seattle had been tortilla, rice and bean eaters, or of African descent, there would have been deaths; there is ample historical precedent that points to the lethalness for people of color acting in large groups on their own behalf. White skin remains a privilege. And yet, it was still an honor for me as a working class, man of color to have been there those rainy days in Seattle side by side with valiant idealistic rebels who understood the meaning of this gathering of international officials setting up the economic agenda for you and me for the next period. The battle in Seattle was a great way to end this year and this century, to close the millenium; it represents definite hope for the future.     

The Spanish Revolution: Book Review (April 2007)

It’s not possible for me to do justice to my recent readings on the Spanish revolution; still, I’d like to try to distill my thoughts on the material, before they disappear into the recesses of memory, so take this as a “book report” or a brief reflection on these histories.
You asked me how the story of the Spanish revolution is of use in the present. Even though social reality is very different now from Europe of the 1930s, I think that studying the Spanish Civil War/Revolution, and analyzing it as a revolutionary watershed in which different models of struggle were attempted, might throw light on the question as to what type of activism we should do now or what sort of organizations we are to build.
Some current political debates taking place now within the Left were prefigured in the dilemmas faced by the Spanish revolutionaries of that period. In the present, Left organizing is confused, inchoate and the expression of opposing principles. Seventy years ago the multiple Left parties of Spain fought each other over opposing objectives, their organizations and movements espousing contrary political values. The Spanish revolution might provide perspective to our contemporary political disagreements. For what its worth, for those of us libertarians wary of authoritarian tendencies the Spanish revolution provides many lessons.

“BOOK REVIEWS”: THE SPANISH REVOLUTION
Gerald Brenan’s book—The Spanish Labyrinth: An Account of the Social and Political Background of the Civil War (1943)—does an excellent job of describing the contours of Spain’s history and the variegated social classes that took the stage throughout the last centuries up to the Revolution. One fascinating passage in the book is the “origins” story of Spanish anarchism in 1868, the quintessential organizer tale, of the Italian anarchist Giuseppe Fanelli. Sent by Mikhail Bakunin, the Russian anarchist, Fanelli went about preaching “the idea” to peasants and workers during the day and sleeping at night in a railroad train car, traveling in this way across the country.

The Republic of February 1936 was the culmination of a long, bitter, back-and-forth struggle between enemy class forces and opened up the possibility of a proletarian-led assumption of power, led by the anarchist CNT and the Socialist UGT. The anarchist movement was strong in the northeastern regions of Catalonia, the Levant, and Andalusia and to an extent Castile. The Confederacion Nacional de Trabajo (CNT), guided by the Federacion Anarquista Iberica (FAI), had a solid support among the industrial workers and wage-earning landless peasantry. At its strongest the CNT counted on 1.8 to 2 million loyal cadres. Their revolutionary unions and committees used direct action tactics, strikes, armed resistance, and had as their ultimate goal collectivizing industry and agriculture, to the dismay and violent opposition of the large and petty bourgeoisie and the large and small landowners. Between these combating actors rested the military, the middle-classes, the sharecroppers, and other social sectors shifting their support to one or another pole.
These internal class struggles were complicated and sharpened by the Franco coup of July 19, 1936, when the Falangist-fascist military rebels rose up in Andalusia; the moderate Republican Madrid government hesitated in organizing a resistance to Franco, balking at arming the workers for fear of opening the doors to a revolution from below. Those doors were flung open nonetheless by the libertarian communists who, seeing that the moment was ripe, seized cached weapons, formed armed volunteer militias in the cities and rural areas, and waged an initial war of resistance to Franco spreading out over two-thirds of the country. They also unleashed massive expropriations and collectivisations of enterprises in the regions they controlled.
Brenan, no anarchist himself but sympathetic to their over-all aims writes:
“The only reasonable solution through wide tracts of Spain is a collective one…In many districts the peasants are themselves averse to it, but the anarchist ideology in Andalusia has made it a favorite solution there and this is a factor which any sensible government would take advantage of. For the advantages of communal ownership of the land are enormous. Under the present conditions one has agricultural laborers dying of hunger on estates where large tracts of corn-growing land lie fallow because it does not pay to cultivate them.” Brenan, p.123

Burnett Bolloten’s book, The Spanish Revolution: The Left and the Struggle for Power during the Civil War (1979), is a giant, meticulously detailed history of the power struggles between Communists, anarchists, Republicans, Catalan nationalists, the formerly-Trotskyite POUM and the Socialists. I could not put this book down, so deftly and thoroughly does Bolloten explain the international context of behind-the-scenes power plays between London, Paris, Moscow and Berlin, and the proxy military war amidst the regional-local political struggles throughout the Iberian Peninsula.
Hitler and Mussolini’s armies soon intervened on the side of Franco. In order to offset the threat of a fascist eastward assault if Spain were lost to Franco Stalin concluded that the British and French governments had to be swayed in favor of the Republican Loyalists; the western “democracies” had to be reassured that in opposing German and Italian attacks they were supporting a moderate republic, and not an anti-bourgeois revolutionary upsurge, that is to say, the anarchist, and up to a certain point Socialist, revolution.
In July 1936 the anarcho-syndicalist CNT-FAI had complete mastery over the situation, the power to determine the future of the country. They were the political/economic center of gravity. However, there is debate as to whether they had adequately anticipated the rapid turn of events—now in their favor—and whether they had prepared a coordinated plan or system of governance addressing the threat of fascism and soon an ascending Stalinism within their house.
In their congresses, the CNT-FAI had hammered out transitional platforms for a revolutionary take-over; Abad de Santillan, an anarchist theorist and militant, had outlined in his “After the Revolution” the economic policies the libertarian movement would implement in industry and agriculture. Anarchism had a long tradition of federated organizational structure and decision-making.
The heart of the matter lay in the cohesion and efficacy of CNT-FAI political strategy and tactics. Even though they held the great masses of the Spanish workers in their camp, deep divisions in their leadership—between governmental collaborationists and orthodox anarchist abstentionists—rendered them incapable of coordinating offensive actions, effectively resisting the encroachment of the central government upon their economic and political turf, and establishing a counter-power to the Russians and their Spanish Communist puppets.
With the Politburo’s Togliatti in charge, and thousands of on-the-ground Russian “advisors”, including NKVD-OGPU intelligence agents, Moscow orchestrated operations and directed the Spanish Communists to place themselves at the service of the reactionary middle-classes, military ‘Loyalists’, small landholders, and white-collar employees in a Popular Front and to seize control of the state apparatus. In a series of brilliantly executed and surreptitious campaigns, manipulating crypto or philo-communists, they took hold of the crucial cabinet posts, either directly or by proxy, dismantled the volunteer militias, organized a conventional army and put a brake on the collectivization/socialization process. Bolloten describes this as the “curbing of the Revolution”.
The Communists were aggressive, extremely well organized, energetic, intransigent and ruthless in their campaign to take power. They demonstrated an incredible aptitude for combating and undermining rival parties, exploiting weaknesses and driving wedges between factions. Their expert use of propaganda and slander techniques was key to their power. A crucial moment was the take over of the Socialist party led by Largo Caballero by exploiting the division between its right and left wings. They then used these elements to seize key ministry posts in the Republican government, gaining command over the military operations.
Jesus Hernandez, a former politburo member, wrote:
“In our political struggle, we could rely upon something the other organizations lacked: discipline, the concept of blind obedience, absolute submission to hierarchical control…what did the others have in the face of this granite monolith? A broken, divided, fragmented Socialist party, working in three different directions, with three representative figures…we managed to exploit their suicidal antagonisms for our own ends. One day we supported one side against the other. The next day we reversed our position and supported the opposite side. And today, the next day, and every day we incited one side against the other so that they would destroy one another, a game we played in full view and not without success. Thus, to destroy Francisco Largo Caballero we relied principally on Negrin and, to a certain extent, on Prieto. To get rid of Prieto we utilized Negrin and other prominent socialists, and had the war lasted we would not have hesitated to ally ourselves with the devil in order to exterminate Negrin…Among the anarchosyndicalists the panorama was no better…although their ranks were tighter and more compact than those of the Socialists, we managed nevertheless to create a breach. We helped to deepen the schism—a product of evolution—that was developing in the CNT by drawing into government collaboration a large part of the anarchist movement, which thereafter experienced a process of internal strife.” Bolloten, p.464

Eventually the Communists were able to challenge the anarchists in their home regions of Catalonia and Aragon, dismantle their collectives and break-up their organizations. They also were able to ultimately kill off their nemesis, the POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificacion Marxista), an anti-Stalinist Marxist party that challenged at every turn the political path that Russian socialism had taken.
Brenan writes:
“The Communists were incapable of rational discussion. From every pore they exuded a rigid totalitarian spirit. Their appetite for power was insatiable and they were completely unscrupulous. To them winning the war meant winning it for the Communist party…but perhaps more serious…was their lack of moral or political integrity. Their opportunism extended to everything. They seemed to have no program that could not be reversed if its reversal promised them any advantage, and they were just as ready to use the middle classes against the proletariat as the proletariat against the middle classes…By their devotion to an institution rather than an idea, to a foreign Pope rather than to a national community, they were following the road laid down by Loyola. And their impact on Spain was very similar. Just as the Jesuits from the time of Lainez had turned their backs on the great ascetic and mystical movements of their age and had worked to reduce everything to a dead level of obedience and devotion, so the Communists showed that the great release of feeling that accompanies a revolution was distasteful to them. They frowned on all its impulses, both its cruel and its creative ones, and applied a severely practical spirit to its various manifestations.” Brenan, p. 326

Perhaps emblematic of the superior strategy and cunning of the Communists over the Republicans, Socialists and libertarians was the incident involving the transfer by dark of night of 500 metric tons of gold reserves, valued at $500 million in 1936 dollars, from Madrid to Moscow. These funds, freely handed over by the Socialist premier, were later used to and finance and arm Communist war efforts, hold the Republican government hostage and undermine opposition. Stalin told a banquet of Politburo members celebrating the successful appropriation, “The Spaniards will never see their gold again, as they don’t see their ears” (an expression based on an old Russian proverb).
But for all their efforts, Britain, France and the U.S. were not persuaded by the Communist camouflage. The western powers would not support Republican Spain—anarchist, collectivist, proletarian, revolutionary Spain—against fascism, no matter how well the USSR tried to disguise what was happening on the ground.
Bolloten surveys the larger chess game played by the “democracies”, Moscow and the Axis powers and how these fed the internecine political battles in the rear; Thomas Beevor—The Spanish Civil War (1982) —describes the deadly impact of these maneuvers at the battlefront. Beevor’s writing is vivid and lucid, a dramatic, blow-by-blow account of the military war.
Acknowledging their impressive organizing and military capabilities, Beevor details Communists actions that were strategically counter-productive in terms of effectively fighting Franco and the German/Italian forces and verged on the suicidal—replacing important anarchist columns with their own regiments, denying needed materials and weapons to rival anarchist and POUM units, conducting inadvisable “prestige operations” meant to enhance their military reputation abroad. In the end, by demoralizing, harassing, suppressing and killing off the base of resistance—anarcho-syndicalism, the POUM and the Socialist party—the Communists undermined the anti-fascist war effort and cleared the path for Franco’s triumph in March 1939.
Beevor describes the suppression of the anarchist collectives in Aragon in the summer of 1937:

“At the end of July…the communists launched a propaganda offensive against the Council of Aragon’s president, Joaquin Ascaso, who was a controversial and flamboyant figure. The communists accused him of acting like a Mafia chieftain. His libertarian supporters, on the other hand, defended him vigorously…Ferocious attacks were made on the system of self-managed agricultural collectives in the main Party newspapers Mundo Obrero and Frente Rojo, because it ran counter to the ‘controlled democracy’ which Negrin and the communists advocated.
“…(T) he carabineros, which Negrin had built up when finance minister, were used to harass the collectives by confiscating their produce. Then, on 11 august, the central government dissolved the Council of Aragon by decree while its members were gathering in the last of the harvest…these ‘maneuvers’, as they were officially described, involved mass arrests and the forcible disbandment of the Council…along with its component organizations. CNT offices were seized and destroyed, and the collectives’ machinery, transport, tools and seed grain were given to the small proprietors whom the communists had encouraged to resist inducements to work the land communally.” Beevor, p. 206

Beevor credits the Communists with being expert at regime building, and in fact at creating a monolithic dictatorship. In the last few months of the war the Communist party’s notorious Servicio de Inteligencia Militar (SIM) was the ultimate incarnation of a cold vision, terrorizing the citizenry through surveillance and the use of secret torture prisons. The U.S. anarchist Emma Goldman quipped that Spanish anarchism was crushed between the twin pillars of fascism and Stalinism; the SIM proved to be Communism’s purest expression in Spain.

“It is difficult to know the total number of agents employed by the SIM. There were said to have been 6,000 in Madrid alone, and its official payroll was 22 million pesetas. Its 13 sections covered every facet of civilian and military life and were present in every district and command…The most feared section was the 13th, otherwise known as the Special Brigade, which was responsible for interrogation…
“The SIM’s interrogation methods evolved beyond beatings with rubber piping, hot and cold water treatment, splinters inserted under nails, and mock executions which had been carried out in the early days. The Soviet advisers made the procedures more scientific. Cell floors were specially constructed with sharp corners of bricks pointing upward so that the naked prisoners were in constant pain. Strange metallic sounds, colours, lights and sloping floors were used as disorientation and sensory deprivation techniques. If these failed, or if the interrogators were in a hurry, there was always the ’electric’ chair and the ‘noise box’ but they risked sending the prisoners mad too quickly.” Beevor, p. 211

The show trials and purging of the old Bolsheviks in Moscow throughout this period were the general backdrop and set the climate for Communist actions in Spain. Anticipating Leon Trotsky’s fate in Mexico in 1940, the POUM’s charismatic founder, Andres Nin, was abducted, tortured, killed and disappeared by Stalinist agents. In an ironic twist, most of the top Russian advisors in Spain were liquidated or disappeared after being recalled to the USSR.
Vernon Richards’ Lessons of the Spanish Revolution, 1936 -1939 (1983) , is an anarchist self-criticism analyzing the fatal splits within the libertarian movement that led it to being out-maneuvered and defeated by its opponents. Richards places the main responsibility for this on the collaborationist FAI heads, “influential leaders”, charismatic individuals who basically abandoned their principles, joined the government, and accepted cabinet ministry portfolios that meant nothing. (Buenaventura Durruti and Francisco Ascaso, anarchist militants known for their unimpeachable principles, were killed in battle in the first months of the war; Cipriano Mera, another anarchist military leader, had his fighters take part in joint war actions with the Communists while managing to skirt any further compromises with the central government. In the grim, final days of the war Mera was key in helping to depose the Communists.)
As for this “influential leadership” of the CNT,
“There can be no doubt that their minds had been made up in the first days of the struggle when the revolutionary action of the workers, such as the expropriation and reorganization of the essential public services under workers’ control, was in its early stages. As a result, far from ensuring that the Revolution should be as far-reaching as the workers were able to lead it, their decision to recognize the State and the authority of democratic government created confusion in the workers’ ranks, and instead of seeking to destroy bourgeois institutions through the creation of revolutionary organisms, they found themselves occupying posts in those very institutions which all their experience had taught them should be destroyed as the first step in any thoroughgoing revolution. As (Franz Borkenau) rightly pointed out in the early months of the struggle, ‘an old rule about revolutions was once more confirmed; a revolution must either be carried through to the end, or had better not start at all.’” Richards, p. 193

The downfall of the anarchists was prepared by FAI representatives who had de-linked themselves from their rank-and-file comrades, and pinned their hopes on the “realistic” politics of the Popular Front instead of relying on and expanding the libertarians’ own forces, that is, strengthening their already powerful support among the masses.
Paraphrasing anarchist historian Jose Peirats, Richards writes that it is unpardonable for the anarchists

”Who know more about the machinations of the political and state machine than anyone, to offer excuses such as that they had been caught unawares, nor that they were ingenuous so far as politics were concerned ‘in view of the ease with which some of them adapted themselves to political protocol and the situation’. Indeed Peirats observes that ‘in the period 1936-39 there emerged a new class, heir to all the tasks previously held by the class that had disappeared. And it included some sections of the libertarian movement’.” Richards, p. 232

Had the CNT-FAI stuck to its guns (literally and politically) and directly opposed their rivals, “called the question” early on and thus precipitated the clash of forces, they might have struck a determining blow while they still held a superior strength. Anarchism may have been able to defeat or decisively check the Communists, whose following was relatively small at that point, along with their bourgeois allies, and carried the revolutionary process beyond the initial stages. Instead the CNT- FAI leadership wavered, got caught up in the game of collaborating with the Republican government and squandered the power it had built over decades of organizing and movement building.
Richards attributes the defeat of the anarchists to corrupt leadership. He gives example after example of how the readiness and spirit for Revolution of the popular masses was quashed by their dissembling and self-contradicting leaders. Yet even with this he feels that the odds were in the favor of an anarchist juggernaut rolling over its opposition in the early stages of the war.
By contrast Bolloten suggests that the CNT-FAI was unprepared in terms of strategy and program once the Revolution began. Quoting a Major Escofet, general commissioner of public order who recalled that the CNT in Barcelona found itself

“Virtually in control of the streets, the arms, and transportation, in other words, with the power in its hands, its leaders, who were bold and energetic and experienced fighters, were disoriented. They had no plan, no clear doctrine, no idea what they should do or what they should allow others to do. The CNT concept of libertarian communism was devoid of realism and was silent as to the road it should follow in the revolutionary period.” Bolloten, p.372

Ultimately, the Communists formed a united front of the bourgeois parties under their hegemonic sway and arrayed these counter-revolutionary forces against the anarchist and radical UGT collectivization. This political-military coup effectively pinned the workers’ movement, nullifying its chances for expansion or maneuvering. The May Days of 1937, when Communists troops in Barcelona turned on and drew the anarchists into a battle for this key city, was the opening salvo.
Whether anarcho-syndicalism was prepared programmatically and militarily for all eventualities or not, whether to collaborate or remain autonomous: these are the questions the debate centers on. As someone who has just begun to scrape the surface of Spanish anarchist history, I concur with Richards’ analysis, although with reservation. There was no clear-cut path for the anarchists confronted with the contradictory, torturous dilemma of joining (submitting to) the Popular Front for the sake of national unity versus their commitment to make a proletarian revolution and establish communism on their own terms.

SOME CONCLUSIONS
The idea of “socialism” is now correctly associated in the minds of most people with a grim history of police states and gagging of free expression, Gulags and forced labor, show trials, public confessions and purges, decline from revolutionary vanguards to bureaucratic elites, and collapse of bankrupt socialist regimes to the unbridled capitalism now taking place in Russia and China. State socialism triumphed and with its victory died the dream of the “freely associated producers” as the masters of their collective destiny, of the proletariat running industry and agriculture through its own democratic organs.
Stalinism’s practices, and those of its imitators, are largely ignored by the US Left; thinking persons who point out this history are advised to put things in perspective, to take into account the reality of encirclement by White Armies, attacks by the Cold Warriors, the menace of the US nuclear arsenal, CIA espionage. The internal corruption of Socialism is rarely theorized or subjected to Marxist critique by activists, Marxists or otherwise. When the question is actually engaged, it is explained away as a series of tragic but unavoidable mistakes or regrettable deviations from an otherwise heroic history.
By way of illustration of this denial or amnesia, an exhibition which just opened at the Museum of the City of New York, “Facing Fascism: New York and the Spanish Civil War,” reviewed in the Times’ Art Section by Edward Rothstein, March 24, 2007, celebrates the “heroic” Abraham Lincoln Brigades, U.S. volunteers who fought for Republican Spain. Organized by the Communist Party, these international volunteers of yore still serve to screen and whitewash the less than heroic doings of the Comintern and give the whole enterprise the stamp of an unquestioningly righteous crusade against fascism. The Museum exhibit apparently falls in line with this presentation of reality.
According to Rothstein, the exhibit “deviates little from what would have once been called the party line”:

“What role then, did the Soviet Union play, once the military rebellion had begun? Invited in by the weak left-wing government, it began a methodical attempt to place its agents at central points of control. In October 1936, André Marty — the Comintern leader skewered by Ernest Hemingway in “For Whom the Bell Tolls” — spoke about first using the Spanish anarchists to win: “After victory we will get even with them.” The same year, Pravda spoke of victory as well, then of “cleaning up” Spain “with the same energy as in the U.S.S.R.” Stalin opposed those in Spain who called for revolution; he wanted control.
“By 1937, after the show trials in Moscow, it was apparent to many devoted idealists that the party’s high moral proclamations were not what they seemed. This is what George Orwell fitfully recognizes in his “Homage to Catalonia.” First he fights in an independent Marxist division that was apparently kept deliberately undersupplied. Later he fears for his life in Barcelona — Republican-held territory — as the party begins a planned purge, including killings and torture. Some recent research has suggested that even members of the Lincoln Brigade — some of whom “disappeared” — were not immune.
“As for the newspaper talk about this being a ‘war for democracy,’ ” Orwell wrote, “it was plain eyewash. No one in his senses supposed that there was any hope of democracy.”
None of this can be learned from the show, and to all of it, our heroes of the Lincoln Brigade were blind — or worse.
In a similar vein, who among the neo-Leninist left cares about what happened in Spain or for that matter, what took place within the Socialist camp beyond 1939?”

In 1936-39 a puppet Communism in Spain gained hegemony through the manipulation of the political (f)actors at hand, including the vacillating Republican moderates, the opportunistic Socialist right wing, the sell-out CNT “leaders”, and by reliance on the material support of the USSR. The literature points to a well orchestrated “remote control” of Spanish operations from Moscow. While nationalization of the means of production (MOP) was its rhetoric, the Party’s signature economic policy was restoration of private ownership in industry and agriculture and guaranteeing the class privileges of the dominant parties that had not gone over to fascism. It proclaimed itself to be the general staff of the proletariat army in resistance to fascism; in actuality it was a Jacobin party set in motion against the Enrages, carrying out Stalin’s orders and safeguarding the rule of a bureaucratic coordinator clique in Russia. The Spanish Revolution, which had been seeded decades before and expressed the most profound aspirations of the working class, was sacrificed to this action.

Who in Left circles cares to understand how the apparatchik leaders of the Socialist Fatherland came to so easily transform themselves into the new bourgeois rulers, or how the political bosses of the former USSR passed over into their new roles of capitalists? What happened so that now the Chinese Communist Party is the #1 leader in the privatizing of the public domain, callously indifferent to the fate of a new underclass created by their policies, and for that matter wreaking ecological devastation on the natural environment in its hell-bent drive for profits and growth. Yet these states are the archetype of choice for the current Leftist movements, the template off of which they work. National liberation movements throughout the globe embrace this model and those struggles in turn are the ideological inspiration for the efforts of US activists.
The National People’s Congress in China, led by the Communist Party earlier this month regulated the taxation for foreign and domestic corporations, thus streamlining further the rapid capital accumulation of the new economic overlord class. Meanwhile, the Party and its State, which once laid its claim to legitimacy by championing the Chinese peasant masses, has discarded millions of landless poor who now migrate from city to city in a desperate search for survival.
In the former Socialist fatherland and in the Chinese People’s Republic a bandits’ banquet is taking place. Yet present day Leninists remain silent about this betrayal of the proletariat and peasant masses they lionized before, refusing even to acknowledge what’s happened, and won’t theorize or analyze these results of Real Existing Socialism, failures of immense proportions rooted in its ideology. Colorful posters of determined, iconic workers in the people’s republics, with clenched fists or brandishing hammers and sickles or toting weapons, might still adorn the walls of the typical Leftist office but in actuality the descendents those heroic masses have rejoined the global capitalist wage labor and consumption machine.
Leninist politics are given a free pass—it was Stalin who twisted socialism’s meaning, it is argued. The neo-Leninists insist that revolution necessitates a seizure of state power, a temporary, but necessary, party stewardship. According to Leninists the claiming of the state, with their party at the steering wheel, is the culmination of the revolutionary struggle, the basis for real social transformations. History shows that this one-party control becomes permanent, attenuated, and that the centralized state’s power never reverts back to the popular masses but is instead consolidated in a core grouping, the regime of a relative few. No revolutionary break with the template of class hierarchy and class domination takes place, the autocratic past isn’t superseded, only the substitution by a new coordinator class for another, modified and reinstalled in a new guise.
Luxemburg’s counter-arguments for worker democracy and self-rule by the masses, the Workers’ Opposition, the council communists and soviets, all who stood against the tide of authoritarian control, were shoved aside; today those arguments are dismissed as outdated or irrelevant.
Those who would style themselves as a new Lenin-Mao-Chou En-Lai-Fidel-Guevara or Ho Chi Minh, or as their cadre, must acknowledge that what ensues after the insurrection stage and upon the seizing and consolidating of power is the “states-craft/statesmanship” period. With the end of the opposition struggle phase of a revolutionary process, the vanguard-centralist party-builders ultimately usher in the bureaucrats, the apparatchiks, and new ruling class formation. Gramsci or Poulantzas may be invoked to explicate the complex blocs and class formations in order to rationalize what essentially boils down to a new hierarchical order. State socialism degenerated to the gray realities of the Comintern, Stalin, the Cheka, Togliatti, Beria, Kruschev, Eurocommunism, Hoxha, Ceacesceu, Pol Pot, etc. The subsequent system collapse then mutated into their present-day heirs in Moscow, Beijing, and Berlin.

“The distinction between the libertarian and authoritarian revolutionary movements in their struggle to establish the free society, is the means which each proposes should be used to this end. The libertarian maintains that the initiative must come from below, that the free society must be the result of the will to freedom of a large section of the population. The authoritarian on the other hand believes that the will to freedom can only emerge once the existing economic and political system has been replaced by a dictatorship of the proletariat which, as the awareness and sense of responsibility of the people grows, will wither away and the free society emerge.
“There can be no common ground between such approaches. For the authoritarian argues that the libertarian approach is noble but ‘utopian’ and doomed to failure from the start, while the libertarian argues on the evidence of history, that the authoritarian methods will simply replace one coercive state by another, equally despotic and remote from the people, and which will no more ‘wither away’ than its capitalist predecessor. The free society can only grow from the free association of free men (that is men whose minds are free from prejudices and who ardently believe in freedom for others as well as themselves).” Richards, p. 206

The Spanish revolution and Communist counterrevolution embodied vying interpretations of socialism: the Party’s goal in Spain was not to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat, but a State aimed at restoring bourgeois democratic political forms and the social relations that reigned prior to the revolution, albeit under Communist domination. Conversely, Spanish anarcho-syndicalism or libertarian-communism, organized and guided by the anarchist FAI, was the indigenous up swell of workers and peasants, intent upon actualizing the social revolution as communism now, and not in a far off future.
The CNT-FAI militated as a party of the fighting proletariat and peasants against the other classes, in a protracted struggle to gain supremacy. In its role as vanguard and ideological proponent the CNT-FAI remained faithful to its insurrectionary roots. Its program in Catalonia, Aragon and the Levant was to “empower” the workers-in-arms so as to build the politico-economic organs—collectives and freely associated self-management of the MOP—that would establish libertarian communism. The Commune principle of direct representation by the assemblies guided its activism.
Nonetheless, this solidly based urban-agrarian anarcho-communist movement, lacked a clear national strategic vision, and was split by a fatal internal cleavage on the issue of political participation. Spanish proletarian anarchism was “out-organized” by an authoritarian group with powerful outside backing that had as its mission a reactionary “holding action”, the delaying and derailing of the revolutionary possibilities.

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