Workers Solidarity Movement

WHAT WE THINK

To the activist who strives to contribute to the birth of an authentic memory of the anti-authoritarian current of the workers' movement, the question is posed thus: what is the contribution of the historic episode that was the acts and ideas of the Friends of Durruti? Therefore to complete this study, we must draw up a balance-sheet, to assess in some way their achievements and failures.

WHO WERE THE FRIENDS OF DURRUTI

We saw, in part one, that opposition began to show itself against the lawyers who were, to a greater or lesser extent, accustomed to ministerial collaboration. Notably the Catalan Libertarian youth had declared their refusal to "become accomplices by staying silent" and they had even added "we are ready to return to illegal existence if necessary..."

THE REPUBLIC OF 14 APRIL 1931

It is absolutely necessary - the Friends of Durruti tried to point out - to find a path which allows revolutionaries, without compromising and without falling into an unprincipled anti-fascist front, to have a practical strategy of struggle which unifies the proletarian forces against the violent blows of the reaction, militarism and fascism. One understands why the Friends of Durruti, should have given such importance to the so-called choice 'war or revolution'

But, before addressing the events and their analysis, we must lay out, as briefly as possible, the composition of the forces present on the "antifascist" side, in order to assist the journey of the non expert reader across what one author has called the "Spanish Labyrinth". The bibliography which we give will allow one to find fuller information.

Barcelona, May 1937. The first issue of 'The People's Friend', the organ of the Friends of Durruti, appeared. The police repression of the Republican state had just crashed against the fighters of the barricades who had responded to the stalinist provocations by retaking the road of revolution. But while the combattants of the revolution were taking the fight to the forces of repression of the Catalan Generalitat and of the central state, the anarchist 'leaders' of the CNT-FAI, having become ministers of the bourgeois government, asked the victors of the barricades to lay down their arms, to have faith in their 'leaders' to settle the conflict and to reunite the anti-Franco forces.