01x03 - In Memory of the Vanquished

[bunniefuu]

Transcript format and synch by Andante

Whether individualist, illegalist,

propagandist of the deed,

anarcho-syndicalist, platformist,

Christian anarchist, or anarcho-primitivist,

anarchism has had as many nuances

as it has faces.

And now that it appears to be
confined to a minority,

people forget there was once a time

that it dominated the world.

And yet in the years
following the First World w*r,

in Europe, anarchism seemed
to have lost all of its influence.

It wasn't just the t*rror1st attacks

by the so-called propagandists of the deed,

or the widespread decreeing of spurious laws

which forced anarchism into the shadows,

but rather the b*ll*ts and shells of

Verdun and the Somme,

which k*lled in some countries
up to a third of working men,

leaving them in the w*r cemeteries

along the Chemin de Damme

and thus silencing the militants

of the masses.

Not to mention the millions of amputees,

the brain-damaged, and
the seriously shell-shocked

for whom revolution
was no longer a priority.

But outside of the
industrialized nations of the West,

anarchists survived on the
edge of the great empires,

taking up arms again and trying
to deliver triumph to their ideals.

And faced with reactionary tendencies,

which also had numerous faces,

libertarians could only imagine

delightful utopias.

During this fertile period between the wars,

when capitalism gave
birth to its two evil beasts,

Stalinism and fascism,

and faced with a totalitarian hydra

which further generalized theft
and industrialized death,

they had to fight a w*r on two fronts

and more than ever prove with their deeds

the effectiveness of their thought.

And thus the anarchists gave rise,

not that we always remember,

to some of the biggest
revolutions of the 20th century,

and wrote in red and black letters,

a new page in our history.

For 50 years on the continent of America,

anarchists formed the backbone
of social action.

They were members of the
Industrial Workers of the World,

which spread its wings
from Canada to Australia.

They fought alongside Fora,

the huge Argentine Workers' Federation.

In Bolivia, they gave FOI

a red and black flag as its emblem.

In Chile, they organized mass demonstrations,

and among the ranks of FORU in Uruguay,

they led shows of strength

on the streets of Montevideo.

They controlled the docks in the Caribbean,

opposed fledgling banana republics,

and fought for the independence of Cuba

and Puerto Rico.

In the United States,

they protested on roller skates

against unemployment and against w*r,

brandishing the skull and crossbones.

It was the anarchists,
and not the communists,

who prompted within
successive US governments,

despite the famous red scare,

their darkest fears.

In 1917, during yet another witch hunt,

mass roundups were organized.

Thousands of foreign anarchists

were arrested as a prevention,

held in prisons,

and finally deported on the Buford,

ever so subtly nicknamed

the Soviet Ark.

And as the land of liberty

feared libertarians more than anything else,

propaganda was spread against a

backdrop of ragtime, smiles, and cartoons.

Cartoons that amalgamated

anarchists in Bolshevik Vermont,

assimilating them to rats

that needed exterminating.

Cartoons made by a joyous

captain of industry,

who would end up showing his affection

for the n*zi Party.

The United States is a country

where the w*r against trade unions

and other workers' movements

was of an unparalleled brutality

in the Western world.

A brutality often enforced

by the powers that be,

aided by the mafia.

Sounds unbelievable, but it's true.

The government worked with the mafia

to break the trade unions

and the workers' movements.

There was a very strong
repression in the United States,

notably against Italian
immigrant anarchists,

who mainly adhered to the so-called

anti-organizational tendencies.

They were partisans

who were in favor of expropriations,

armed robberies, and so on.

So the authorities took
advantage of this situation

to criminalize these activists.

And Sacco and Vancetti would pay

the ultimate price.

Sacco and Vancetti were two

essentially rank-and-file

anarchist militants,

who never would have been
remembered by history

except for what ends up happening to them.

They are two followers of Luigi Galliani,

the militant anarchists who promoted

propaganda by the deed,

who was also opposed to syndicalism,

thought that unions were dangerous

because they tended to be hierarchical,

tended to be bureaucratic,

and that he worried they would become

barriers between workers and their goals.

So he opposed unions

as the vehicle to create revolution,

instead looked to create

large-scale insurrections,

hopefully inspired by some of these acts.

Dozens of attacks were carried out

targeting those who represented power,

such as the billionaire Rockefeller

and Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer,

seen here viewing the aftermath

of a bombing from his window.

The authorities' eyes naturally turned to

the movement led by Luigi Galliani,

partisan of the propaganda of the deed.

In his newspaper, Konaka Subersiva,

this lawyer advocated the direct,

immediate, and individual use of violence.

His booklet, La Salute En Voye,

Salvation is in You,

enjoyed a degree of success.

In its foreword,

what was basically a b*mb-making manual

was presented as a must-have

for any proletarian family.

For several years, his influence had grown

within the Italian community.

Sacco and Vanzetti belong to that current

in the anarchist movement.

They were militants.

They believed in revolution

by any means necessary.

The sooner, the better.

At the time that they're arrested,

they don't know that that's
why they're being arrested.

They think they're being arrested
because they're anarchists

and because anarchists are being rounded up.

So they are very evasive

when they're interrogated.

They don't answer everything truthfully,

which ends up being
brought up at their trial

and uses evidence against them.

On the steps of the Boston courthouse,

thronging with reporters and onlookers,

the shoemaker and fishmonger were accused of

being the authors of an armed robbery

which resulted in the death of two people

late in 1919.

Although neither of them
had a police record,

their anarchy tendencies were
enough to see them charged.

As the flash bulbs popped,

this minor incident became

a political affair.

It becomes a very, very high-profile case.

There's an extremely large movement

in support of Sacco and Vanzetti that grows

not just in the United States,

but worldwide.

There's a save Sacco and Vanzetti movement

because an increasing number of people,

not just anarchists and radicals,

but liberals of various stripes,

unions, become convinced

that the evidence against them
is extremely flimsy,

which it is.

On American soil,

anarchists tried everything

to have the two prisoners released.

Firstly, with bombs,

like the attack on Wall Street,

the first car b*mb in history,

which resulted in 38 deaths and 200 injuries,

but to no avail.

Then, through a legal battle, with appeals,

cross-examinations, new trials,

which, despite their death sentence,

managed to delay their execution

for seven years.

And finally, through a media campaign,

with defense committees springing up

pretty much everywhere.

But although the campaigns
to defend Sacco and Vancetti

were initiated by anarchists,

as strange as it might seem,

it was those across the globe,

those who had become their worst enemies,

who took up their defense.

It's, of course, ironic

because the Communists adopted their cause.

But the Communists, of course,

at the same time, were executing

and imprisoning anarchists

in the Soviet Union.

So they certainly didn't
have any real sympathy

for Sacco and Vanzetti's political beliefs.

Today we know that Moscow took the decision

to champion Sacco and Vancetti

to turn them into the symbol of

bourgeois repression,

capital repression,

and the country that epitomized capitalism,

the United States of America.

It also earned them

moral capital,

good feeling in the socialist

and working class movements for them

to champion these two

Italian-Americans who are facing death.

And so they did manipulate

the Sacco and Vanzetti case

and use their martyrdom

in order to further their own political interests.

And that's very sad.

Unaware of the attempts at manipulation,

but aware of the injustices

carried out on anarchists,

grassroots communist activists

stepped up their efforts.

On the Place de la République
in Paris, France,

in Tokyo, Berlin, Sophia, Asuncion,
and Trafalgar Square in London, England,

Communists also protested against
the execution of Sacco and Vancetti,

but in vain.

Nevertheless, despite this widespread

public outrage, they are both ex*cuted.

They're sent to the electric chair in 1927

after their sentences are upheld.

And this is... it's a devastating blow.

The anarchist movement

was crushed in the United States,

and you weren't really to see much

in the way of an anarchist movement

in the United States again until the 1960s.

It would be many years

for all the manipulation and exploitation

to be denounced and admitted,

resulting in the governor of Massachusetts,

Michael Dukakis, finally proclaiming that

any disgrace should be forever removed

from their names.

And 50 years to the day
after their execution,

thanks to Joan Baez singing to music
composed by Ennio Morricone,

Vanzetti's last words, the
death march of the anarchists

finally became an international hymn
for justice and freedom.

Here's to you, Nicola and Bart,

rest forever here in our hearts

The last and final moment is yours

That agony is your trial

Here's to you, Nicola and Bart

Rest forever here in our hearts

Anarchism then suffered by becoming
a huge diaspora.

A diaspora of Russian anarchists,

North American anarchists,

Italian anarchists.

Naturally, many of them moved to France.

Because France wasn't a dictatorship,

it was still a free democracy.

So they emigrated to France.

The anarchist movement,

which had hoped for a triumphant revolution

in the aftermath of the First World w*r,

found itself beaten on all fronts.

And the question arose, why were we beaten?

In the Roaring Twenties, Paris became

the center of the world once more.

Montparnasse took over the artistic baton

for Montmartre.

In the tinted light of the first neons

at the brasserie La Rotonde,

Le Dome and Le Select,

following in the footsteps of Courbet,
Pissarro and Seurat,

artists were inspired

by libertarian thought.

Artists like Marcel Duchamp,

self-proclaimed ant-artist,

certain members of the Dada movement

who published their early works
in libertarian magazines,

the first surrealist who adhered
to poet André Breton's statement

that an anarchist world,
or surrealist world,

is the same thing.

The Russian émigré painters
seeking refuge in Paris,

British and American authors,

and those who remain unclassifiable,

like Leo Mallet, Jean Dubuffet,

Jean Vigot and Jean Cocteau.

Anarchism swept through the arts

with its wind of freedom and rebellion.

But far from the velvet-covered café benches,

soon after the armistice,

the workers' movement,

with its one and a half million dead

and four million w*r wounded,

paid dearly for the folly of a few men,

and in the patriotic headlines
that followed victory,

workers gradually turned their backs

on anarchism.

There was a real break, a cultural break,

which resulted from society having been

totally militarized for four years.

That did not favor the growth of anarchism.

And I don't think it was down to chance

that the form the Workers' Party took

after World w*r I was Bolshevism.

Bolshevism had a hierarchical structure,

very similar to that of the factory

and the army.

In the 1920s, despite the massive strikes

led by revolutionary socialists,

French society and the workers' movement

began yielding, slowly but surely,

to new tendencies.

By founding the French Communist Party
after the Tour Congress,

Marxist-Leninists,

strengthened by the seizing of power
by the Bolshevik Party in Russia

and the creation of the Komintern

began to attract the proletariat.

The Communists gained ground
on the anarchists,

took over their structures and
appropriated their martyrs and symbols,

like the international, which, after
the removal of a few bothersome lines,

became the Soviet hymn.

The struggle led by Leninists
across the globe

also claimed its victims.

Two anarchists were k*lled
in violent street fights

over the control of the
trade union headquarters.

But as if that weren't enough,

in the postwar years, anarchists saw

a new threat rise up.

For to mislead workers even more,

to fascinate the working class and
to reassure the lower middle class,

capitalism decided to wear

its most spectacular mask yet...

Fascism.

The fascists had fought in the w*r

and had learned the most evil

lesson of w*r,

which is violence.

But unlike the violence
of the revolutionary left,

fascist violence was more professional.

The fascists had learned during the w*r

that violence needed to be

extremely well organized.

The expansion of the fascist
movement through violence

was accompanied by an attempt

to appropriate the symbols of anarchism.

Such was the case of Action Française,

presided over by Charles Morris.

It created the Prudent Circle,

a political think tank named
after the founder of anarchism,

so as to attract workers into its fold.

It would become the cradle of
French fascism.

Or, like Benito Mussolini,
a former teacher and journalist,

who founded the Italian
National Fascist Party

and dressed his young militiamen in the
black shirts of the anarchist movement.

This son of a socialist revolutionary

had even frequented leading figures

of the anarchist movement,

such as Lida Raffanelli, the Italian activist

who converted to Islam,

with whom he had a brief relationship
as a young man.

And it was probably this
which gave rise to the legend

that Il Duce himself had been

an anarchist before World w*r I.

There's a wonderful anecdote which gives us

an idea of Malatesta's intuition.

In 1913, Malatesta returned to Italy

and visited Milan,

where he met with Mussolini for an hour.

At the end, they said goodbye,

and a friend of Malatesta asked him,

so what do you make of Mussolini?

Malatesta replied, he's not a socialist

and even less an anarchist.

He's a revolutionary

who will clear lots of paths.

Indeed, it's true that

Mussolini had translated Kropotkin's

The Great French Revolution into Italian,

but he had never been an anarchist.

Never.

And after Malatesta, anarchists were

convinced that they would need to fight

against the new European despots
with violence,

and they alone would fight against

the threat with weapons.

Like in Italy, where Michael Esquiro,

Angelo Sparlotto, and Anteo Zamboni,

who would end up being lynched by a mob,

plotted their own assassination attempts

against Mussolini.

In Spain, fascist dictator
Primo de Rivera was the target,

while in France, the heroic
Jermaine Burton shot down

the chief editor of Action
Française's newspaper.

And in the United States, which had
installed a genuinely apartheid regime,

only the libertarians of the IWW

dared stand up to the r*cist militia

of the Ku Klux Klan.

And let's not forget that in Germany,

the anarchist Marnes van der Lub
set fire to the Reichstag

because it had become
the anti-chamber of Hitlerism.

But for the majority in the movement,

individual response was no longer adapted,

and it was during the debates
held by the first anti-fascist fronts

that they advocated what was for them

the only possible response to the threat.

Among the anti-fascist fronts,

it became a question of a lesser evil.

If the principle evil was fascism,

they would need to unite to fight fascism,

and once fascism had been defeated,

they would fight amongst each other,

but dialectically,

about the different ways to organize society.

The anarchists didn't accept that.

They believed they should
fight fascism militarily

and also fight with the social revolution.

To them, the only way to eradicate
fascism was through revolution,

which would drain the financial
and social foundations of fascism.

In June 1926, in Paris,

a pamphlet was published entitled

Organizational Platform of the
General Union of Anarchists.

It was a thunderclap in the small
libertarian world.

Not only for the appeal
it launched to unite the movement,

which had always rebelled
against all forms of organization,

but also for the name of
its principal signatory,

a returning from the ashes
and tears of the Ukraine,

then working on the
assembly line at Renault,

and whose body was one big scar,

Nestor Makhno.

Makhno arrived in Paris,

having experienced prison camps

in Romania, Poland, and so on.

And he arrived at a time when
revolutionary ideals were in decline,

because they were no longer
the dish of the day across Europe.

Plus, the image of the Soviet Union was

positive enough for the communist movement

to build itself upon.

So the anarchist movement found itself

extremely marginalized.

A number of anarchists believed
that the origin of their defeat

lay in the absence of organization

and the lack of togetherness
between anarchist groups.

And this point of view was upheld
by the so-called Maknavists,

the supporters of Maknoe,
who would publish, with Arshinov,

documents in which they
declared themselves favorable

to the founding of an
organized anarchist body,

based on the principle
of collective responsibility,

which they believed to be fundamental
to taking up the fight again

and eventually winning it.

Anarchism is no beautiful fantasy,

no abstract notion of philosophy,

but a social movement of the working masses.

For that reason alone, it must gather

its forces into one organization,

as demanded by the reality and

strategy of the social class struggle.

The organizational platform published below

represents the outline,

the skeleton of such a program,

and must serve as the first step

towards gathering anarchist forces

into a single, active, revolutionary

anarchist collective capable of struggle.

It's high time that anarchism emerged

from the swamp of disorganization.

Long lived the organized anarchist movement,

long lived the general anarchist union,

long lived the social revolution of the

world's workers.

Some may have interpreted the platform

as a desire to copy the Bolshevik Party.

But it was actually the transposition

of what the Makhnovists stood for

as an anarchist group.

By which I mean the elimination of
anarchism from artistic trends,

from individualistic tendencies,

and from t*rror1st anarchism.

It was clearly a class w*r

led by armed groups.

Rather than encourage
the union of the anarchist movement,

Makhno's appeal caused
one of those endless debates

that only libertarians were capable of.

Responses flew in from across the globe.

Oppositions, controversies, syntheses...

Total confusion reigned.

And all this simply convinced Makhno

and his followers even further

that the anarchist movement

needed discipline and unity.

He decided to gather his supporters
at Les Lérolles in the Paris suburbs

for an international congress
held on the 20th of March, 1927,

at the movie theater, Lérolles.

Among those who attended were anarchists

from Russia, Italy, Poland, Bulgaria,

and even China,

including the author, Bajin.

But at the time, Makhno was more focused

on the situation in Spain.

Why Spain?

People have often asked the question,

maybe because people don't like anarchists.

It was Leo Ferre who said that.

But more realistically,

it's because in Spain, socialists were

already viewed as anarchists.

It wasn't a socialist tendency.

In Spain,

socialism was already seen as anarchistic.

Anarchism in Spain didn't just
have working-class roots,

like in France or Italy.

It had a genuine working-class foundation

made up of hundreds of thousands

of activists.

A working-class foundation which gave rise

to a young 30-year-old anarchist mechanic

who had sought refuge in Paris

and had caught the eye of Makhno.

His name?

Buenaventura Duruti.

They swapped stories,
talked of past failures,

and spoke of new possibilities.

Duruti revealed his t*rror1st past,

explained the already old organization
of the Spanish anarchist movement,

and told of his hopes for
a revolution in Catalonia

or in the plains of Aragon,

which so resembled the steps of Ukraine.

Impressed by the bravery, intelligence
and determination of the Spaniard,

Makhno gave him a copy
of his political manifesto

and vowed that if a revolution
were to be sparked in Spain,

he would come to fight at his side.

What the anarchists
represented and aspired to

was a very lofty ideal

that would take a lot of preparation.

In Spain they had been preparing
for 70 to 80 years

for the Spanish Civil w*r.

So when revolution hit Spain,

people were ready,

because they had been preparing
a long time for it.

In 1936, in Spain,

the anarchists weren't only prepared

because since the late 19th century

they had carried out a number of

propagandas of the deep missions,

like the attacks by the mysterious Manonegra,

Black Hand,

or the 1912 assassination of the

prime minister by Manuel Parrina Serrano,

reconstructed here for a docudrama.

Neither was it because some of the

major martyrs of the cause,

like the suspected anarchists garroted in

Jerez de la Frontera, Francisco Ferrer

and the peasants m*rder*d
in the Casas Yeras, were Spanish.

Nor was it because the Catalan
anarchist newspaper rang out

the same slogan ad for
the Mexican Revolution.

And nor was it because some of the major

peasant and factory worker uprisings

had taken place in the Levante,

in Andalusia, in the Rioja, in Catalonia,

and finally in Asturias

with the October Revolution,

quashed by the young General Franco

under orders from the recently elected

center-right government.

No, Spanish anarchists were ready

because the libertarian movement had been

solidly organized from its earliest days.

Firstly, within a powerful Spanish section of

the Workers International Industrial Union,

then within the FAI,

the Iberian Anarchist Federation,

and the CNT,

the National Confederation of Labor,

which, on the eve of Franco's coup d'etat,

was one of the best structured unions in

the world with the most members.

The world is vast.

But it wasn't only Western Europe

that had the strongest union power.

But that wasn't all.

The biggest organized social power,

not political,

because the term is ambiguous, was the CNT.

By late spring 1936,

the National Confederation of Labor

had about a million and a half members

throughout Spain,

including half of all Catalonians.

With only one single paid bureaucrat,

which is quite incredible,

if you think about it,

one paid person in an organization that big.

In 1936, Maknoe had died

and Hruti had returned to Spain.

Elections took place.

Anarchist groups,
which presented no candidates,

urged their members to vote
for the Spanish Popular Front.

And with millions of libertarian votes,

the left wing won with a tiny minority

and a government formed including socialists,

republican democrats,

and a handful of communists.

The reaction from the right wing was swift.

General Franco ordered all army regiments

to take control of the country.

Civil w*r had begun.

Franco's coup d'etat came about in 1936,

and Spain burst open like a watermelon.

On one side was the progressive front

and on the other the fascist front.

And for three years,

it was a violent face-off.

Like in Italy and in Germany,

the upper classes applauded the putsch.

Captains of industry provided

finance for the fascists

and the democrats abdicated.

The government of the Popular Front,

rather than call for resistance,

resigned three times in one day.

The people were left to their own devices

as half of the country

fell under Franco's control.

Libertarian groups launched an

appeal for a general mobilization

and suddenly, in all spontaneity,

as one, the anarchists, answered the call.

In Catalonia, led by Durruti,

in charge of defending Barcelona,

libertarians fended off right-wing forces.

To the barricades, the hymn of the CNT,

written by Valeriano Orobon Fernandez,

a leading anarchist-syndicalist theoretician,

in just a few hours,

became the battle cry of half a nation.

Columns formed.

Durruti was appointed delegated commander

of a militia made up of volunteer

freedom fighters.

The column, with 3,000 men and women

divided into several centuries,

named after significant martyrs such as

Sacco and Vanzetti, the Durruti column,

along with the red and black column,

marched on Zaragoza, then converged

on Aragon to confront the fascist armies.

Inspired by the magnivists,

Durruti and his troops fought a w*r

and led a revolution.

They forced fascism into a retreat,

which later, the Republican armies

were unable to do.

But that was notably on Aragon,

and the moment that the Durruti columns

liberated a village, they immediately

proclaimed libertarian communism.

In every liberated village,

members of the Durruti column

talked to the peasants.

The anarchists told them to do away with

the hedges separating the fields

and to create vast collective zones

and to work the land altogether.

As they advanced, the libertarians

chased out masters and gods

and declared the end to all privileges.

On the squares of liberated villages,

lively new dances replaced the old laments.

Couples formed in public.

Land, work, and bread were shared.

The elderly received retirement benefits,

and people took time to enjoy life.

New practices were invented

and solidarity was renewed.

Anarchism deployed its thinking

to the extreme.

Farmers' assemblies, literacy campaigns,

over 800 Spanish towns and villages

declared themselves communes,

and one of the greatest collectivist

experiments in history had begun.

There was an expl*si*n of experiments.

Whole towns, not just villages,

did away with money.

Great!

But how would they live?

So they invented something that wasn't

in the writings of theoreticians,

the so-called familial salary

where everybody worked together.

But how do you share things?

Based on individual effort?

No, based on individual needs.

They abolished money.

It seems unbelievable today, but

thousands of people adhered to it

and organized themselves around it.

Naturally, on these liberated lands,

the clergy was expropriated

and the former landowners found themselves

working hand in hand with the peasants.

Things didn't go smoothly everywhere.

The anarchists chased out the Guardia civile

and the fascists.

But then Franco's troops
reconquered the villages,

and you can imagine the repression
that came after.

People mention the churches burned down,

and the priests k*lled by the anarchists.

It is true.

It did happen.

When power is seized by the people,

it generates acts like that.

Revolutionary anarchist Michael Bakunin

himself said, when revolution comes,

it's inevitable that a hundred heads

will roll.

A hundred heads isn't a lot compared to

the horrors committed by the fascists.

With almost unlimited material
sent by Henry Ford

and the support of Italian troops

and the infamous German Condor Legion,

Franco and his followers launched

a campaign of social and
ideological cleansing.

Like in Seville,

where 8,000 people were bayoneted to death.

Or at Guernica, where men, women and children

were indiscriminately slaughtered

by Luftwaffe bombs.

Despite widespread fears,

the request for arms made by the libertarians

to Western democracies went unanswered.

The anarchists could, however,

count on the international
solidarity of the movement which,

in newspapers and conferences,

appealed for supporters to join
the ranks of the insurgents.

The Frenchman, Sebastien Faure.

Anarchist burglar, Marius Jacob.

The Algerian, Mohamed Sail.

The Argentinian, Diego Abbad de Santillan.

The Belgian, Louis Mercier-Vega.

The Russian, Georges Sossenko.

And political activist, Simon Weil,

who enrolled in the Durruti column,

like Emma Goldman, who at 67 years old,

fought in Catalonia.

From all around the world, men and women

arrived in Spain to support the revolution.

And with the first international brigades,

the Abraham Lincoln Brigade,
made up of mostly IWW members,

the Malatesta Battalion,
nicknamed the Battalion of Death,

and the Louise Michel Battalion from France,

foreign revolutionaries,

as they arrived, suddenly

brought about a change.

In their countries of origins,

whether they were French, British, American,

or Italians or Germans

who were in Franco's camps,

at no time had they ever encountered

an anarchist movement on such a huge scale.

George Orwell wrote a wonderful account.

In Britain, he frequented

not a communist milieu,

but a Trotskyite milieu.

And he came to Spain to fight.

When he arrived in Barcelona,

it was a big discovery for him.

In Britain, he had no idea

that the anarchists existed

and even held the city.

His account has a slightly odd title,

homage to Catalonia.

In theory, it was perfect equality,

and even in practice,
it was not far from it.

There is a sense in which it would be
true to say that one was experiencing

a foretaste of socialism,

by which I mean that the prevailing

mental atmosphere was that of socialism.

Many of the normal motives of civilized life

had simply ceased to exist.

The ordinary class division of society

had almost disappeared.

There was no one there
except the peasants and ourselves,

and no one owned anyone else as his master.

As the international
brigades left to reinforce

the anarchist columns on the front,

to the rear, now aware of the key role

the propaganda could play,

the libertarians took over the film industry,

and with the little money they had,

shot newsreels of the fierce battles

they were fighting in Aragon.

But in this w*r of images,

in which for the first time it was they

who were doing the filming,

the anarchists made sure to report on

the scale and specifics of their revolution,

as CNT cameramen captured live footage

of an insurgent capital.

The first report on events in Barcelona

was made by the CNT,

the Union of Public Spectacle.

They went out onto the streets to film

what was happening at the barricades.

We have some marvelous footage of a city

in revolution.

We don't have any of St. Petersburg

or other places,

but here we have footage that tells

what a city in revolution is like.

These images show a city
that is practically anarchist,

with an incredible popular enthusiasm that

has never been reproduced in our history.

These newsreels revealed to the world

the scale and coherency of the Spanish

libertarian revolution.

Amidst the remains of the barricades and

the destroyed centers of power,

documentary makers such as Felix Marche

captured each step in this great upheaval.

Here, anarcho-syndicalism was

working at full steam.

All forms of bureaucracy, non-productive jobs

and the role of foremen were abolished.

Major decisions were taken in councils,

work was carried out in common,

and production means recuperated

by the collectivity.

In Catalonia,

far from the industrial heart of Spain,

over 75% of companies were self -managed.

Tramways, taxis and buses,

hotels and restaurants,

bakeries, fishing, foodstuffs, textiles,

the leather and shoemaking industry.

All these small businesses,

like large companies,

were now managed collectively

with no fall in efficiency or production.

The revolution even made
inroads into culture,

which suddenly became popular
and social once more.

Movies, classical music, opera and cabaret

were managed directly by the actors,

dancers, musicians, technicians and ushers,

who were all members of the CNT.

Emma Goldwyn, who was 67 when she arrived in

Catalonia to support the revolution, wrote,

The collectivization of
the industries and the land

stand out as the greatest achievement

of any revolutionary period.

Your revolution will destroy forever

the idea that the anarchist project
means chaos.

Moreover, if Franco should win

and the Spanish anarchists be exterminated,

the work they have started
will continue to live.

It means that anarchism can work.

But on what condition?

On the condition that the majority of people

believe in libertarian principles.

So it's possible to found a society

without authority and without government,

or with a minimum of authority

and a minimum of government.

The triumph of anarchism in Spain

found a last but paradoxical expression

on November 4, 1936,

when the Republicans decided to form

in Madrid a new government of victory.

So as to rally the different anti-fascist

groups against the Franco forces

for the first time in history,

four libertarians became ministers.

On the one hand, their presence was

in order to reinforce the government.

But it was also a way for the anarchist

militia to obtain arms.

So it was give and take.

But they were ministers
with no real importance.

They entered government
with a strategic aim.

They did it to have some

control over the government,

to prevent the government

carrying out anti-anarchist acts.

In practice, the anarchist militia

didn't really obtain more arms.

And in the eyes of the combatants,

this entry into government was

at the worst a betrayal
and at the best a mistake.

So a split formed between

the grassroots anarchists

and the four ministers.

The anarchist movement began to break up.

The Communist Party,

also with representatives in the government,

began to play a more preponderant role

thanks to the military backing

provided by Stalin.

And they were intent on taking advantage

of the split.

The communists demanded that

the libertarian revolution be adjourned

and the anarchist militia disarmed,

then drafted into a regular army

under the command of political commissioners

sent specially by the Soviet Union.

The government and the four anarchist

ministers voted for the proposal.

Durruti saw it as a betrayal.

He spoke out.

If you don't want those
who are fighting to mistake you,

you in the rear ground for our enemies,
then do your duty.

The w*r we're currently fighting is being

fought to crush the enemy at the front.

But is it our only enemy?

No. The enemy are also those

who oppose revolutionary conquests,

those who are amongst us,

those we will also crush.

In the eyes of the Stalinists
and the Republicans,

Durruti and his column, which held Aragon,

had become too strong,

too dangerous and too radical.

It was urgent to seize back control.

The moment he wanted to change things
too radically,

the reformists turned against him.

The Stalinists, who wanted to found

a society with a strict hierarchy,

turned against him, and obviously

the bourgeoisie was against him.

And it was at that moment that

the Republicans were caught in a dilemma.

And many of them began saying,

we prefer fascist order to anarchy.

To weaken the anarchists and

to have Durruti in their control,

the government decided to order his column

to Madrid, which was under siege

from Franco's forces.

The libertarians smelled a trap.

But Durruti hoped to use the occasion

to relaunch the revolutionary process

in the Spanish capital.

His death, which came about

in mysterious circumstances,

gave rise to the most outlandish of rumors.

He was in a car,

and he wanted to check out the situation.

So he got out,

and when he came back to the car, he died.

More precisely, he was shot.

One of the first interpretations

was it was an assassination.

A shot like that, from close range,

can only be an assassination.

And this rumor was immediately

spread by Franco's camp,

in order to say that the Republicans

had started k*lling each other.

This theory was then
taken up by the communists,

who said that the anarchists were just

a disorganized bunch of petit bourgeois

who were k*lling each other.

But I think it was an accident.

In the car was a soldier holding a r*fle.

On a lot of r*fles back then,

the safety catch didn't work very well.

And as Durruti got in, he took a b*llet.

During the civil w*r, saying that a figure

like Durruti had died in a stupid accident

caused by a misfiring g*n

would have sounded ridiculous.

Still today,

the circumstances of Durruti's death

remain unclear.

His body was transported

across the country to Barcelona.

A cortege of over a half a million people

made its way to the Montjuic cemetery

where he was buried.

It was the last large-scale
public show of force

made by the anarchists
during the Spanish Civil w*r.

Durruti was an icon.

And without Durruti,

anarchism had lost its figurehead.

Anarchism is a political theory

which advocates the destruction of power.

It's not a strategy for political conquest.

Communism, on the other hand, is.

And the Communists,

who numbered only 10,000

compared to millions and millions

of anarchists,

managed in under a year

with the backing of the Soviet Union

to take control of things.

And that's when the Great Repression started,

which would culminate
in the events of May 1937,

and the violent clashes in which

the libertarian revolution was crushed.

It was during what anarchist historians

call the May Days of 37,

part of which is featured in the movie

Land and Freedom by Ken Loach,

that the revolution was crushed.

It began with the Battle of Telefónica.

Since the beginning of the revolution,

the anarchists had controlled

Barcelona's telephone central.

The Republicans, allied with the Stalinists,

were determined to oust them.

The fuse was lit.

The people of Barcelona raised barricades.

Despite calls for calm

from the anarchist ministers,

they faced off like a Kronstadt



Only this time alongside the Trotskyists

did the Workers' Party of Marxist
unification, practically unarmed

against 3,000 fully equipped
and highly trained as*ault guards.

The clashes lasted all week.

Remember that Franco's putsch in Barcelona

had been put down in two days.

But the fighting here,

between the base and the government,

lasted seven days,

with over a thousand dead

and hundreds wounded.

After the defeat of the anarchists

during the May Days of 37,

and the ensuing repression,

the gates of Barcelona were open

to the fascists.

The Republican and Stalinist government

could now step up

counter-revolutionary measures in the

small territory still under its control.

On May 25th,

the Anarchist Federation was

excluded from the People's Court.

On June 6th, governmental decree

made all rural collectives ill*gal.

In early August,

the Regional Council for the Defense of

Aragon was definitively disbanded.

At the end of August,

criticism of the Soviet Union

was officially banned.

On January 6th, 1938,

the government prohibited by decree

the issuing of money by the committees.

And later in 1938,

the government annulled all that remained

of the collectives and reinstated all rights

to wealthy landowners.

The Spanish libertarian revolution
had been quashed,

and in Moscow,

Pravda declared in its editorial,

the cleansing of anarchists
has been completed

with the same gusto as in the Soviet Union.

The Spanish Civil w*r ended

on April 1st, 1939.

Many anarchists were interred

in concentration camps.

But many of them also faced the firing squad.

It's unbelievable when you compare the number

of CNT and Anarchist Federation members

just before the Spanish social revolution

with the number that remained

just after the fascist victory.

People might think this was the result of

fascist repression, but in fact,

it was mainly repression
by the Republican government

in line with the wishes of the Stalinists,

and all historians confirm this.

The Spanish Civil w*r was a deeply

traumatic episode in 20th century history,

even if it's not an episode
that immediately comes to mind

when you examine 20th century history.

I see it as a huge turning point.

It was a bloody and truly horrible event

in 20th century history.

The abandonment by European democracies,

the Italian fascists, the Nazis,

Stalinist Soviet Union, the whole of Europe

ganged up to ensure the experiment failed,

and fail it did.

As they crossed the Pyrenees

amongst the thousands of refugees

heading into exile,

those who had survived the w*r continued

to ask themselves why they had lost,

and where and when

they could resume the fight.

The situation of the Anarchist

after the First World w*r was

extremely difficult.

But after the failure of
the Spanish Revolution,

it was catastrophic.

What option did they have left to them?

To join up with the Bolsheviks?

To convert to fascism?

If they wanted to keep up the fight,

what could they do?

Join the French army to fight the Nazis?

What else could they do to save their skins?

In April 1939,

World w*r II was yet to break out.

But on seeing the concentration camps

in which France greeted
the survivors of the revolution,

how could Spanish anarchists
not feel dismayed?

Especially when French Prime Minister
Édouard de la Dier,

who had already reimposed

the 48-hour working week and

signed the Munich Accords,

decided to appoint as the first
ambassador of Franco, Philippe Petain,

the most noble and most
human of our military leaders,

according to Leon Berard at the time.

But the situation was
even more difficult for them,

as it was for all anarchists
across the globe,

because the counter-revolution
was triumphing everywhere.

In fascist countries, of course.

But also in socialist republics
and liberal democracies,

reactionaries added
to their list of victims.

Like during the Memorial Day m*ssacre

in 1937 in the United States,

when the Chicago Police Department

shot and k*lled a dozen workers,

including a woman and three children,

and wounded many others.

And as usual, in a world gradually
being covered with barbed wire,

the libertarians were the first
targets of repression.

From Le Vergnolle to Oranienburg,

they were rounded up, deported,

and some, like Eric Musum, ex*cuted.

For in this context of a global

capitalist crisis,

the crushing of revolutionaries

constituted to the bourgeoisie

the necessary preliminary

for its desire to expand.

And imperialism, as we know it

in the past and in the present,

while constantly uttering the word peace,

had long been preparing for w*r.

Spain, along with Abyssinia and Manchuria,

was much more than a dress rehearsal for w*r.

In reality,

all the non-aggression packs that were signed

merely accelerated the process

which was already underway.

And the sole aim in exacerbating

nationalist sentiments

was to prevent workers from uniting.

So it was imperative to wipe from all memory

all those men and women

who had abolished the state,

currency, and frontiers,

and had tried with all their might and

against all odds to build a better world.

And it was thus in the dark days
of a new world w*r

which would unleash
the most barbaric of passions

and turn the planet into a field of ruins

as workers were drafted into regiments,

fanaticized, reduced into sl*very or to ashes

that the last words of Durruti

could be heard as an echo.

We've always lived in poverty,

and we can continue to do so for some time.

But don't forget that we, the workers,

are the only generators of wealth.

We operate the machines,

we extract coal from the mines,

we build the towns and cities,

and we know that we will only deserve ruins

because the bourgeoisie will try to destroy

the world in the last
instance of its history.

But we have no fear of ruins

because we carry a new world in our hearts.