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Title: Jaime Balius Mir Author: Nick Heath Date: September 20, 2004 Language: en Topics: Friends of Durruti, biography, Spanish Civil War Source: Retrieved on 26th September 2020 from https://libcom.org/history/balius-mir-jaime-1904-1980
Jaime Balius Mir was born into a bourgeois family in Barcelona in 1904.
He gained his baccalaureate and registered in medical faculty. However a
slowly advancing paralytic disease crippled him, and he was forced to
withdraw. He became Catalan nationalist and was attracted to the
insurrectionary nationalism of Colonel Macia. In 1922 he joined Accio
Catalana and took part in the Catalanist demonstrations of 1923. Two
years later he was one of the signatories of the Catalanist Manifesto of
Bandera Negra and was involved in the Garraf plot against Alfonso XIII
and in preparations for an secret Exercit Catala (Catalan Army). He was
imprisoned and then exiled. In France, he became disillusioned with
Macia and independentism . When the Republic was proclaimed he returned
to Barcelona. He joined the BOC (Bloc Obrer I Camperol) but was
disappointed by its centralist tendencies and its collaboration with the
nationalist petty bourgeoisie. Impressed by the Figols insurrection, he
became an anarchist.
He joined the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI) in 1932 and the
anarcho-syndicalist union the CNT from 1936 until his death. He was
sponsored by experienced militants like Pablo Ruiz, Bruno Llado,
Francisco Pellicer, Liberto Callejas, Alexander Gilabert and Eusebio
Carbo. From the time of his FAI membership, he began working as a
journalist for Ideas, Ruta, Superacion, and Tiempos Nuevos. His works
were gathered together in three volumes, where the insurrectionary line
is justified, and the performance of the CNT in the October 1934
Insurrection is defended, and nationalist ideology criticised. He was a
member of the FAI affinity group Renacer alongside Ruiz, Pellicer, and
Bruno Llado. On 19^(th) July 1936, the dawn of the workers’ response to
the generals’ coup which kick-started the Spanish Civil War and
Revolution, he wrote with Gilabert for Solidaridad Obrera (“Soli”) and
distributed it on the barricades. He defended proletarian hegemony in
its pages during that summer. He used this to support working class
independence and the revolution. At the beginning of the war and
revolution he was elected vice-president of the Union of Journalists and
entered Union Grup d’Escriptors Catalans. He wrote for Ideas, Ruta,
Despartar and Mas Lejos. Callejas was director of Soli. When he refused
to print collaborationist speeches — which preached joining the
Republican government — and when Callejas was replaced by Jacinto Toryho
who spoke for the CNT-FAI collaborators, Balius was offered an
honourable exit from Soli and took on the direction of La Noche (The
Night) an old Azanista paper taken over by its workers.
With Ruiz and Felix Martinez he was one of the founders of the Friends
of Durruti which struggled against the betrayals of the CNT-FAI
leadership and the attacks of the bourgeois Republicans and Stalinists.
From 19^(th) May 1937, he edited the Friends of Durruti paper El Amigo
del Pueblo (Friend of the People) made illegal after its first few
issues. He was dramatically involved in the May Days in Barcelona,
during which the Communists consolidated their grip on power in
Republican Spain.
After the May Days the Friends of Durruti centre was forcibly closed
down. Balius was arrested and put in the Modelo prison in Barcelona.. He
continued to write articles from prison. On release he had to go into
obscurity. He and Ruiz got jobs in the milk industry. He wrote his most
famous text Hacia una nueva revolucion (Towards a New Revolution) in
January 1938.
Then Balius and many other surviving Friends were forced to flee to
France in January 1939. There he set up the Grupo-Franco-Espanol de los
Amigos de Durruti with others. With the invasion of France by the Nazis,
Balius again had to flee taking the last boat of the Service of
Emigration of Spanish Republicans (SERE) to leave for Latin America in
1940. Landing in Santo Domingo, he then spent some time in Cuba before
ending up in Mexico where he stayed for the next 17 years. In 1961 he
traveled to Paris, meeting up with his old friend Ruiz. They attempted
to reorganise the Friends but this endeavour failed. He obtained a place
in the residential home Beau Sejour near Hyeres and became for a long
period editor of Combat Syndicaliste and Tierra Libre, papers of the CNT
in exile. With the transition in Spain he began to be visited at Beau
Sejour by students, historians and dissident anarchists.
In 1978 Paul Sharkey translated Hacia una nueva revolucion into English,
and Balius wrote a new introduction for it. He maintained his
revolutionary Ă©lan , but his physical deterioration became more
pronounced. He died on 13^(th) December 1980. Ruiz died 3 years later.
The last Friend still alive is Joaquin Perez Navarro, now 97 and living
quietly in London.