The Friends of Durruti and 'Towards a Fresh Revolution'

The friends of Durutti were setup in 1937 by rank and file members of the CNT and members of CNT columns resisting militarisation. "Towards a fresh revolution" was published in 1938 as "a message of hope and a determination to renew the fight against an internationalism." . It is obviously aimed at activists in the CNT and it pulls no punches in it's attacks on the Spanish bourgeoisie and "colaborationists" in the CNT.

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PDF file of Towards a Fresh Revolution

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War & Revolution

An introduction to The Friends of Durruti

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THE WAR in Spain (1936-1939) has often been portrayed as a simple struggle between Fascism and democracy. In fact it was anything but. A military coup launched in July 1936 was defeated by worker's action in most parts of Spain.

There then followed a wide ranging social revolution. As many as 5-7 million were involved in the collectivisation of agriculture and thousands in worker's control of industry. About 2 million of these were also members of the oldest union in Spain the anarcho-syndicalist; CNT.

As with all revolutions a counter-revolution followed quickly on the Spanish revolution. This was spearheaded by the Spanish Communist party. These were faithful adherents to Stalin's foreign policy of sucking up to France and England in the hope of military and economic alliances. They resisted the revolution at all stages and found willing allies in the Spanish republican and socialist forces. All took pains to convey to the world a struggle between fascism and democracy.

They also took steps to try and make it such a struggle by smashing collectives and factory committees and sabotaging the efforts of revolutionary forces at the front. However even more worrying is the fact that the "anarchists" of the CNT made little attempt to combat these forces. In fact four became government ministers.

One tendency within the CNT; the Friends of Durruti resisted the growing reformism within the CNT. In this review of their pamphlet; "Towards a Fresh Revolution" Conor Mc Loughlin outlines their importance to modern anarchists. The full text of the pamphlet itself is below.

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"We are not interested in medals or in general's sashes, we want neither committees or ministers"
Bueneventura Durruti - Solidaridad Obrera Sept 12 1936

"The government has posthumously granted the rank of Lieutenant Colonel to the illustrious Libertarian leader Buenaventura Durruti on the anniversary of his death"
- Solidaridad Obrera April 30 1938

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The friends of Durutti were setup in 1937 by rank and file members of the CNT and members of CNT columns resisting militarisation. "Towards a fresh revolution" was published in 1938 as "a message of hope and a determination to renew the fight against an internationalism." It's a short and relatively easy read. It is obviously aimed at activists in the CNT and it pulls no punches in it's attacks on the Spanish bourgeoisie and "colaborationists" in the CNT. However be warned it does assume a certain amount of background knowledge of the history of the CNT and the Spanish revolution. It would be useful to read in conjunction with Vernon Richard's "Lessons of the Spanish Revolution"

JULY 19th 1936

The pamphlet begins by recalling the massive gains made by Spanish workers in areas where they had succeeded in beating the fascist coup. The coup had been defeated by workers facing down the military often with their bare hands. It had been defeated without any help from the popular front government who refused to arm the people. This was to be repeated throughout the course of the "civil war". The workers confronted fascism with revolution the government proved more afraid of revolution then fascism (which is not to knock the many genuine anti-fascists in some of the government parties.).

The July events triggered a massive social revolution throughout Spain. Workers took over in the factories and on the lands and began the creation of a self-managed communist society. Millions were involved in agricultural communes and worker's self management in the factories.

The pamphlet however poses the central question. Why, when a clear majority supported and took part in the building of a social revolution, wasn't this pushed forward by the CNT; the massive anarcho-syndicalist union. Their answer is brief: "what happened had to happen"

Why was this sellout inevitable as the FOD maintain? Why did leading anarchists move on to become leading ministers in the Spanish government?

In explaining their apparently fatalistic view of the CNT the FOD go on to show how the CNT was devoid of any revolutionary theory or programme. They had "Lyricism aplenty" and detailed plans had been laid down as to how an anarchist Spain would operate at their national conference in Saragosa in May 1936. But they couldn't get from A to B, from bread and butter struggle to a future libertarian society.

For this reason they handed the revolution to the tender mercies of the Socialists, republicans and Communists. These forces which emerged without a shred of support from the July events were not slow to rebuild. Instead of destroying it they propped up the Spanish state in it's hour of need. As the FOD put it: "It breathed a lungfull of Oxygen into an anemic, terror stricken bourgeoisie."

Garcia Oliver one of the "leading militants" who was shortly to enter the government claimed he had avoided "an anarchist dictatorship". This shows a complete and crass lack of understanding of the essential tasks of an anarchist organisation i.e. the smashing of the state and the transfer of power to worker's and peasants. The CNT and Spanish workers were to pay in blood for this collaboration.

We acknowledge the great work of the CNT in propagandising anarchism and the struggle against Franco. But we must stand with the FOD in absolute condemnation of the deferring of revolutionary politics to class collaboration.

The FOD had a programme which could have won the support of the Spanish masses and led them to anarchism and the destruction of Fascism. However they were too small and too late. The need for such a programme has never been more pressing

MAY 3rd 1937

By this stage the counter-revolutionaries in the "republican" camp felt confident enough to provoke a fight with the Barcelona working class. Police under the command of Rodriguez Salas, the public order commissar, attacked the telephone exchange. They were strongly resisted by CNT organised workers inside.

Barricades soon sprang up all over the city. Fighting broke out with the CNT and POUM (non-Stalinist Marxists) quickly gaining the upper hand over government and PSUC (Stalinist controlled Catalan "Socialist" party). After an armed stand off the workers were finally persuaded to lay down arms by the CNT "leadership".

The FOD strongly urged workers to remain put and were in the thick of the fighting. They pointed out that the workers had won and now controlled Barcelona (after a steady erosion of their position since July 1936). They insisted that workers stayed put. They issued a manifesto calling for the disbanding of the army and parties which had supported the coup and the establishment of a revolutionary Junta to continue the war.

It is worth explaining exactly what they meant by this Junta since the word has very bad associations. They wanted the Junta to control only the war effort. It was to be made up of elected, recallable delegates. The economy was to be under the control of workers through their syndicates.

For issuing these demands they were attacked as traitors and agent provocateurs. The CNT brokered peace was an abandonment of the revolutionary Barcelona workers. Several thousand troops arrived from Valencia. There were mass arrests, executions and immediate press censorship. The destruction of the POUM and CNT by Stalin's CHEKA agents began.

The May events were a vital turning point in the Spanish revolution. The collectives were crushed throughout republican areas soon afterwards. Worker's control was smashed and militarisation completed. The "peoples army" then suffered massive and bloody defeats at the hands of the fascists.

We would agree with almost all the FOD's positions summarised at the end of the pamphlet. These include;

1. That the war should have been a continuation of the revolution with a democratic worker's army.

2. All available arms and money should have been seized by the workers. (The CNT spent most of the war guarding the government's 2,259 pesatas in gold! This money which could have aided the revolution was exported to Russia to buy the arms that helped destroy it.)

3. No collaboration with the Spanish bourgeois

4. Real worker's unity

5. Total socialisation of the economy and food distribution

6. Equalisation of pay rates

7. No armistice with Foreign imperialist powers.

To this we could only add the immediate granting of independence to remaining Spanish colonies.

The FOD were armed with a revolutionary programme that could have brought Spain towards anarchism and crushed the Fascists. But they were too small and to late to hope to win workers to it's implementation The need for anarchists organised with such a programme has never been more pressing. We are attempting to build one.

Conor McLoughlin
Based on an article published in Workers Solidarity No34, 1992

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Introduction written by Jaime Balius in 1978.
He had been secretary of the Friends of Durruti and director of its paper

Forty Years Ago

The Friends of Durruti Group was formed in early 1937. Its members and supporters were prominent comrades from the Gelsa battle-front. Remaining true to their anarchist beliefs, they refused to submit to the militarisation and, as a result, moved to the capital of Catalonia (Barcelona) where, along with other Barcelona comrades, they set up the group. They took as their symbol the figure of Buenaventura Durruti, an idealist who had devoted his whole life to his anarchist beliefs. He was a man of action as his heroic death on the Madrid front testifies . . . that heroic and timeless Madrid which lives on in the spontaneous catchphrase which the Republic's government's fight from their city drew from the capital's inhabitants . . . Viva Madrid sin gobierno! (Long live Madrid without government!). This indomitable spirit of the people of Madrid lasted throughout the entire siege of the capital, and it was this spirit that the Group adopted as its own. Thus it was that the fighting men from Gelsa (with the Durruti Column on the Aragon front) became the heralds of the message "Stand fast and fight to the last!" These were virtues which no one can deny that Durruti, the anarchist from Leon, did have. At his funeral Barcelona paid him the tribute of one of the largest popular demonstrations ever, as the Catalan proletariat took to the streets as a body to pay homage to the man who had given his life for the cause of the disinherited the world over.

Having given a rough outline of the nature of our Group I shall now proceed to a short introduction to our pamphlet: Hacia una nueva revolucion (Towards a fresh revolution). First of all, when was it written? Around mid-1938. But it must be emphasised that for us to write a booklet of this sort, with the title we gave it, at that tragic hour for the Spanish proletariat, was a highly suggestive action, amounting to a cry of hope for the fighters of Spain. Notwithstanding their heroism and tenacity, they found themselves surrounded by the most fearful defeat on account of their failure to crush the counter-revolution led by the Stalinists, who were backed by the camouflaged reformists inside the National Confederation of Labour (CNT) and Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI) and all who were established in the upper echelons of the State. The time was 1938 (40 years ago), at a point when the war was a lost cause, and when war fronts were collapsing one after another as a result of the treachery of Stalinists in key positions in the decision-making process, obeying Stalin's orders to undermine the Spanish proletariat in arms. Such was the tragic hour when we of the Friends of Durruti Group at the group's last session, after prolonged examination of the disaster which the counter revolution had plunged us, and regardless of the scale of disaster, refused to accept the finality of such defeat. The infamous policy pursued by Largo Caballero, whose government contained several anarchist militsnts, had eroded the revolutionary morale of the rearguard; and the Negrin government, the government of defeat or capitulation, gave the defeat hecatomb proportions. For this reason we decided to publish Hacia una nueva revolucion which was, as we said, a message of hope and a determination to renew the fight against an international capitalism which had mobilised its gendarmes of the 30s (in other words, its blackshirts and brownshirts), to put down the Spanish working class at whose head marched the anarchists and the revolutionary rank and file of the National Confederation of Labour.

In the prelude to July we can discern the Spain the Spanish proletariat tried to destroy, the theocratic Black Spain ruled by large landowners who had surrendered the economy of the country to foreign powers. This age-old battle was constantly contested from the 15th century up to 1936, setting liberty against tyranny, progress against obscurantism, ever present in this age-old contest were anarchism and the National Confederation of Labour, whose militants were the targets of savage repression under the monarchy of Alfonso Xlll, the grandfather of Juan Carlos, the present monarch imposed upon the Spanish people by international capitalism. This imposition can be accounted for by the terror that the revolutionary Spain inspires in all the inter connected capitalist forces, on account of its sublime gesture of three years of rebellion in the 30s. Hence the fear felt by the Washington-Moscow axis and the Bonn-Paris-London triangle.

Forty years later, the importance of what we wrote in those hours, fraught with passion and grief, is revealed. If, in the 30s, the Spanish proletariat threw itself into the prodigious fray, though outgunned and with its battlefronts and its rearguard undermined by the hybrid, murderous policy of the communists today the Spanish proletariat once again launches itself into the great adventure of revolution. There are hopeful signs in the form of a magnificent younger generation forged in the jails, who have equipped themselves through reference to books, particularly those written by revolutionaries who stood firm against the tidal wave of counter-revolution . . . and in matters of theory, they may be better equipped than the men of July 1936 who were awestruck by the grandeur of a social revolution that dawned so gloriously over Iberian soil, and which, had it but been given proper expression, would have become the first stage of European and thence, world wide revolution.

In that booklet back in 1938 we said that all revolutions are totalitarian. They must be interpreted and must express themselves in the sense that all revolutions are integral. That is to say, they cannot be made by halves nor tackled side-on without the great edifice of revolution coming face-to-face with destruction. It is terrible when one thinks of the way in which revolutions come to grief. The Spanish revolution was doomed to perish from the instant the revolutionary spirit and the war were divorced. Take, for example, the decree on the militarisation of the militias. With regard to the state structure there was no way the Spanish revolution could survive. The defence committees, control patrols and the collectives were dissolved. This was the build-up to the sudden assault by the Catalan proletariat in May 1937, when the workers tried to win back the gains they had made in July.

The May events are described in our pamphlet. The lesson of May is unmistakable. Revolutions can not restrict themselves to the confines of their native land. A new Spanish revolution must, if it is to succeed, assume European proportions. Today's Europe is sitting on the edge of a volcano. Faithful to our message of 1938, we shall go on fighting for a new and European revolution just as the Spanish revolution of 1936 and the Portuguese revolution of 1974 must be labelled European. Both suffered from the same short-coming-they left the State intact and in both case pseudo-revolutionaries repaired the state structures when they were coming apart on all sides.

Europe's workers must help out the Spanish proletariat with the fight against international capitalism which has already been launched on our soil. Europe's solidarity is indispensable if the monarchy imposed upon the Spanish people by international capitalism is to be overthrown. Once again proletarian Spain will serve as the catalyst for proletarian Europe if we establish a close alliance with the Spanish revolutionary workers to counteract the capitalist siege which has the collusion of both socialists and communists.

The transcendent impact of the Spanish revolution of 1936, which would have begun a cycle of European revolutions of necessity, terrified the capitalist magnates who saw in it the overture to extension throught the continent-and thus massacred the Spanish people!

We have indicated the causes of the defeat, but we want to stress the need to prepare an authentic proletarian internationalism which must show itself in the creation of a powerful and European libertarian movement. Let our one hope and hesitation be that the libertarian spirit of the young Europeans of this Europe, which is only a step away from fascism, does not come to naught. The new Spanish revolution is taking shape: all that remains to be done is to organise the mobilisation of all European revolutionaries around Spain, which has not, even for an instant, and in spite of the terrible bloodbath which international capitalism inflicted on it during the 30s and the years of terror in the 40s and under the present monarchy, failed to declare itself.

The monarchy is the creature of the lackeys of the Bonn-Paris axis and of the hirelings of the US gendarme, not forgetting the tacit acquiescence of the USSR.

Jaime Balius, 1978. [The Friends of Durruti]