Thank you for the return of the journals. We will read your article[1] attentively.
We do not believe we are influenced by Accion comunista on the history of the Spanish Revolution; rather, it is we who have exhorted this group to study and critique better a past of which its seems to underestimate the richness.
We quite willingly specify that those who have negotiated with the Phalangist unions have quickly repudiated them; but is this not a question of the old leaders, who are known and respected throughout the CNT in Spain for their struggles and long terms in prison?
We know well the essential weight of the CNT in the victory of 1936. If we have only cited the POUM in our article on America,[2] this is because we are opposed to the naive adhesions to the international brigades, which were manipulated by Stalinism and were a much more critical and revolutionary position that was then taxed by pure betrayal.
It is a fact that one might accuse the POUMists of being conscious agents of Franco, an accusation that, all the same, has not been made against the anarchists in a cynical form. I do not want to say that the positions of the POUM appear to me as a highly satisfactory revolutionary model. But it is a fact that the Spanish Revolution was dead after the days of May [1937].
Guy Debord[1] "What is Situationism?" which appeared in Le Monde Libertaire #127, December 1966.
[2] "The Decline and Fall of the Spectacular-Commodity Society" (cf. I.S. #10, pp. 3-11).
(Published in Guy Debord, Correspondance, Volume 3, 1965-1968. Footnotes by Alice Debord. Translated from the French by NOT BORED! August 2005.)