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Title: National Anarchism? Author: Alexander Schapiro Date: 1937 Language: en Topics: CNT, Solidaridad Obrera, Spanish Revolution, anti-nationalism, fascism Source: Retrieved on 09.02.22 from https://libcom.org/history/national-anarchism-%E2%80%93-alexander-schapiro
The Spanish civil war saw a marked increase in nationalist sentiments
expressed among prominent anarchist activists and in the movement’s
press, which corresponded to the recasting of the civil war as one of
national liberation against the Moroccan, German and Italian troops
fighting the Republic. Prior to the CNT’s entrance into the Republican
government in November 1936, the editorial board of the daily newspaper
of the Catalan branch of the CNT, Solidaridad Obrera (‘Soli’) was
removed. Among those who replaced the ejected journalists was Salvador
Cánovas Cervantes, a proponent of a ‘racial’ understanding of Spanish
anarchism who had previously been kicked out of the CNT after standing
for election during the Second Republic. What follows is a 1937 article
by Alexander Schapiro, a veteran Russian anarcho-syndicalist exiled in
France. Schapiro had been increasingly critical of the CNT’s policies
during the civil war, much to the chagrin of the organisation’s
notables. The one-time National Secretary of the CNT, Horacio Martínez
Prieto, described him in his memoirs as being, at this time, ‘the
greatest enemy of the CNT’. This article is a response to an editorial
in Solidaridad Obrera published on 26 May, which had, in a thinly veiled
attack on Soviet intervention in Spain, indulged in appalling
nationalist rhetoric. Schapiro’s counterblast was originally published
in French in Le Combat Syndicaliste, the publication of the CGT-SR, and
was translated into Spanish in order to be included in a dossier of
offending articles by non-Spanish anarchists that was compiled by the
National Committee of the CNT towards the end of the year.
We know all about national-socialism. Sadly, we have done for a long
time. In France a proto-fascist movement has recently appeared that
calls itself national-communist. These contradictions in terms, mutually
exclusive concepts united with a hyphen, have been more apparent than
ever in recent years, producing the same nausea in us as everything else
that brags about its ‘national’ character. Now there appears on the
horizon, from the other side of the Pyrenees, a new ideology that we can
think of no better name for than national-anarchism.
We refer, once again, to Solidaridad Obrera, which continues to be the
publication of the CNT in Catalonia and the mouthpiece of the national
organisation. An editorial published on 26 May under the no longer
surprising headline ‘Our revolution must be Spanish’ provides an example
of this new tendency, which we could not call anarchist without making
ourselves look ridiculous, but which nevertheless attempts to establish
a link between the anarchism professed by the CNT and the nationalist
chauvinism that seeps from every pore of Solidaridad Obrera’s leader
writer. The arguments in favour of this intellectual somersault deserve
to be recorded and we provide the following passages to that end:
‘The CNT and the FAI constitute a solid and powerful revolutionary
movement that is quintessentially Spanish and quintessentially Iberian.
Quintessentially Spanish and Iberian without being in the least bit
nationalist… The impotence of the treacherous generals has brought about
the direct intervention of Italy and Germany and this foreignization of
Spain, brought about by the rebels, threatens to envelop the entire
Spanish land.
The CNT and the FAI form a mass revolutionary movement that advances
with absolute homogeneity and which counts in its ranks a good
proportion of the hundreds of thousands of men that struggle against the
invader on all fronts of the battle-field and those that work for the
war-effort in the rear. Faced by this danger, it announces its position,
which can be summed up in the phrase: Spain for the Spanish!
If in our country there are parties of exotic origin (!) whose primary
duty is not to the Spanish proletariat, and if there are Republican
fractions that, due to a lack of Iberian character and spirit (!), play
along with such policies, they should be made to confront our position.
A position that is quintessentially Spanish, quintessentially Iberian,
and quintessentially peninsular (!)…
If it is to be desired that in the future Spain should constitute a
political and geographical unit and a nation that contributes to the
peace (!) and progress of Europe, the only viable solution is to allow
this movement to put into practice its fervent desires and to work in
such a way that the revolution that we all profess to struggle for might
be of an eminently national character. Anything else would amount to
covering with a false veil a young nation that has risen from the ruins
of an execrable past to contribute the particular genius of its race (!)
and its civilisation to the constant progress of humanity.
Every revolution bears the name of the peoples that carry it out. Ours
will be called Spanish and so it will be known all over the world…
It must not be forgotten that this is the opinion of a national
revolutionary movement that overflows with life and activity.’
In the first place, let us say that reading this panegyric on
revolutionary nationalism brought to mind sad memories of the Hitlerite
bluff of nationalism with a socialist basis – the socialist aspect to
attract the people, the nationalist aspect so as to present themselves
as the saviours of the country against internationalism.. It recalls in
turn the Stalinist nationalism that puts ‘the fatherland’ above
everything, in contrast to the first phase of the Russian revolution,
which was fundamentally ‘internationalist’. Nevertheless, we will try to
look behind the nationalist veil of ‘Soli’ to see what it is hiding.
To begin with this is a barely disguised attack on the anarchists and
syndicalists who came from almost every country to support the
burgeoning Spanish revolution, which they believed would be the first
act of a revolution that would soon spread beyond the borders of Spain,
affecting Portugal and spreading its contagious virus to France,
Germany, Italy and, who knows, Russia as well! Today, after many of them
have died on ‘Spanish’ battle-fields, or have been murdered in the
rear-guard in ‘Spanish’ streets, the editor of ‘Soli’, from the peak of
his comfortable little Olympus, permits himself to greet them in the
following condescending terms: ‘Let those who consider it a duty give us
the more or less (!) disinterested and generous support that they wish
to…’
Those who went to Spain did so to help you in order that the revolution
begun on 19 July might spread beyond its borders and inundate the entire
world, country by country. For them it was not a question of race or of
civilization, as with that logic we would be forced to conclude that the
Spanish race is specifically revolutionary and that Franco and Mola (may
God bless his soul) are revolutionaries in disguise, just like all the
Falangists, Carlists and monarchists who are no less racially Spanish.
Are we to consider then that the Italian race is fascist and that the
Slavs are a race of Bolshevik assassins?
Racism is the most degrading aspect of fascism; can it be that it has
become the basis of the new domestic policy of the CNT? One would have
to ask: if the Spanish race is what is at stake in the current struggle,
would it not be better to join up with the Negríns and the Prietos than
fight against them, even though they are Spanish by race, so that the
triumphant revolution can suppress, in the first place those racially
Spanish (or Catalan) types such as Franco, Largo Caballero, Companys and
so on, and go on to suppress their allies, of whatever race they may be?
Why not say cleanly and simply that what is attempted is to rid
yourselves of the Communists and the Muscovite intrigues that take place
in Barcelona and Valencia? Comrades of the CNT, is it against the Slavic
race that you direct your attacks or against authoritarian communism,
which is as disastrous today under Stalin as it would be tomorrow under
Largo Caballero or any leader of the Spanish Communist Party? Because to
speak of an exotic orientation, as if social-democracy (whether
Bolshevik or Menshevik) was a speciality of Russia, would be to deny
that Pablo Iglesias had ever existed. And what of anarchism? It is also
completely ‘exotic’, bearing in mind that Bakunin, among many others,
was not Spanish…
We recall that our comrades in Spain had already spoken in Madrid in
1931 of how anarcho-syndicalism had been introduced into Spain –quelle
horreur! – ‘in a beer barrel’, in an aside directed at our
anarcho-syndicalist comrades of the FAUD in Germany. Nevertheless, such
exotic origins have not proven an obstacle to the CNT in Spain proudly
bearing the label of anarcho-syndicalist.
To eulogise racism and disparage ‘exoticism’ are two simultaneous and
complementary phenomena that indicate, to say the least, an
anti-revolutionary state of mind, but where ‘Soli’ really loses it is in
its declaration that Spain should contribute ‘to the peace and progress
of Europe’. We know this phrase well, as it is often repeated by the
politicians in France, whether they are Communists, Socialists,
republicans or Crosses of Fire, that France (which must be for the
French, of course) should work towards the peace and progress of
Europe..
But, comrade anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists of ‘Soli’ and of the
CNT, what kind of peace and which Europe are you alluding to? Surely not
that which exists, just as you are surely not thinking of the democratic
Republic of Spain?! So are you instead referring to the ‘social peace’
which will know of neither exploiting nor exploited classes in a Europe
free from capitalism? If that is so, you must also think that the
revolution must first carry out its libertarian task! And so the Spanish
revolution (so named because the Spanish people have begun it), rising
above any question of race, religion or class, will be the signal
everywhere of a revolution against racist, religious, economic and
political oppression. The Spanish revolution will become an
international revolution, just like the French revolution of 1789 and
the Russian revolution of 1917.
However, the attitude adopted by our Spanish comrades, as reflected in
the editorial in ‘Soli’ discussed here, suggests a liquidation of the
social revolution in favour of a national revolution that could be
nothing other than a formal political gesture and which is revolutionary
in name only.
Be on guard against chauvinism, latent in every man and in every
movement that has not been able to rid itself of centuries of methodical
and systematic poisoning. Keep a look-out for the dangerous cross-roads
and cliff edges that await you, because the road that you have chosen,
in spite of the lessons of the past and in spite of the doctrine in
whose name you continue to speak, is chock-full of twists and turns that
give way to an abyss from which there can be no return.
Better to risk an emergency brake and a no less dramatic return to the
great road that the CNT should never have abandoned.
The mouthpiece of the CNT is unworthy of its duty, its voice is a
shrieking falsetto that should come with ear-plugs. Time to change the
record, and fast.