For the Autonomous Groups, who are partisans of agitation by arms and theory, and who have acted and who will act within the heart of Spain, there is at this moment a real necessity to provide clarifications concerning certain information that has appeared in both the bourgeois press and the so-called “workers” press (determined sectors). Confusionism with respect to the struggle of the revolutionary proletariat for its autonomy is a tradition to which all sectors of the press have been subservient. This confusionism is absolutely necessary to capital and its recuperative instruments (the political parties and the unions) if they are to avoid the situation in which the proletariat understands that it is only by assuming its revolutionary responsibilities at all levels (organization, analysis, action) that it will be able – by negating itself [se niant] as a class – to abolish all power and salaried work, that is to say, [to instaurate] communist society. Any delegation of responsibility engenders power and (so that power is profitable) exploitation.
People have accused us of being anarchists, the armed wing of the CNT, gangsters,[1] drug addicts, etc., whereas we are nothing other than the armed wing of our desires that are unsatisfied by the existence of salaried poverty.
In the current moment, we believe that the surpassing of ideologies as an element of the “separation” of the working class is necessary. The Marxist-anarchist schema is an obstacle to the revolutionary path. The Autonomous Groups agree with us on the plane of action, on a minimal basis: the destruction of the prisons, the abolition of all power as well as salaried labor. The fact there is among us, on the personal level, a member of the CNT has meant that the police have accused us of being “the armed wing of the CNT.” In all our declarations, face-to-face with torturers and judges, we have always denied it. But the professional opportunists have exploited and increased the confusionism created by the police, with the goal of profiting from our actions and from us ourselves.
In 1936, the CNT knew how to lead the Spanish proletariat to a revolutionary situation. But it has shown itself incapable of defending and spreading revolutionary conquest; its leaders have naturally ended up ministers-hostages of a democratic-bourgeois government of capital. This shows where the ideology and the organizational structure of anarcho-syndicalism (and its “natural leaders”) can lead. And this ideology hasn’t been modernized to give it a revolutionary character. May 1937 proved on what side of the class barricade the CNT finds itself: on the side of capital against the proletariat.
In the current phase of the development of capital, the unions are merely the integrating agents of capital. They are its intermediaries on the labor market; they avoid direct confrontation between capital and the proletariat, diverting the latter from its real goals. The Left and extreme-Left political parties do the same job. They are merely the left of capital; their programmes have the amelioration of the management of capital as their single goal; they are the programmes of capital.
We grant the existence of revolutionaries in the CNT (also in other organizations), but their activity within them is condemned to failure, due to its syndicalist character, which is reduced to the struggle for power against the diverse reformist tendencies within the organization. This condemns these revolutionaries to not taking a single step in the direction of revolutionary struggle. They are condemned to failure and defeat even before they enter the struggle.
The democratic dictatorship of capital needs to “criminalize” subversive struggle by making revolutionaries appear to be gangsters,[2] drug addicts, criminals, etc. In the alleged “process of democratization,” Spanish capitalism cannot accept the fact that its prisons are occupied by more than 400 sequestered political prisoners.
Thus, it is clear that we have nothing to do with the ideology of what is called the “libertarian movement,” and that we aren’t “Marxists.” Our practice of class autonomy keeps us apart from such structures, which are only an obstacle to the abolition of the proletariat itself.
For the destruction of the prisons(Published in Appels de la prison de Ségovia, Champ Libre, November 1980. Translated by NOT BORED! 3 May 2010.)
[1] English in original.
[2] English in original.