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Title: Class war in Barcelona
Author: Jean Barrot
Date: 1973
Language: en
Topics: Undercurrents, Spain, 1970s, Barcelona, violence, class war
Source: Retrieved on 27th August 2022 from https://libcom.org/article/class-war-barcelona-jean-barrot-1973
Notes: The following text is the translation of a pamphlet of the group Mouvement Communiste, written in 1973 by Jean Barrot (aka Gilles Dauve), as a means of solidarity for some Spanish revolutionaries arrested in Spain facing harsh penalties. Published in Undercurrent #8.

Jean Barrot

Class war in Barcelona

It might seem a bizarre selection, considering that the armed struggle

(which so much shaped the struggles of the 60’s and 70’s) is largely

non-existent today in Europe, especially so in the UK. Yet, the text

does not simply deal with the armed struggle. It deals with the issue of

violence in general, not in an abstract way but in clear connection with

the social movement of the proletariat. Taking it out of the limited

framework of the situation in Spain in the 70’s, we believe this text to

be a useful critique/analysis of the fetishism of violence, a tendency

which is also visible in parts of the direct action scene in Britain.

---

Introduction to the Greek edition of 1974

The Spanish State arrested in the end of September 1973 around ten

revolutionaries, whom it presented as ‘gangsters’. Three of them are

threatened with the death penalty. They could be sentenced by a court

martial and executed within 48 hours.

If some of them indeed robbed banks, they did so to fund the printing of

texts that are circulating in the radical workers’ movement of

Barcelona. And if a policeman died, that happened after an ambush of the

police.

The point is to understand what some proletarians are historically

forced to do. Violence is always a means for the satisfaction of a

demand: in Spain, where the police shoots unarmed strikers in cold

blood, violence appears directly as a social relation. The simple

writing of texts or the circulation of pamphlets carries the penalty of

many years in prison. Thus those who want to resist exploitation resort

to violence more often than in other countries.

Democracy drowns workers struggles through politics and reformism.

Fascism has fewer reservations and crushes them with violence. Whoever

recognises in the State the monopoly of violence denies the proletarians

the right to abolish their condition: wage labour.

Those of the Spanish proletarians who managed to escape into other

countries are now wanted by Interpol as criminals. The democratic and

fascist States help each other: the international arrest warrants allow

their handing over to the Spanish police. Many of them are threatened

with the death penalty.

In order for us to save them the truth has to shine about the real —

proletarian — nature of their activities. Whoever does not expose the

lie becomes a collaborator not only of the Spanish state, but of the

French and all the others.

Class war in Barcelona

On the 16^(th) of September 1973, the police caught two Spanish

revolutionaries after the attack against a bank near the French border.

A wave of arrests in Barcelona followed. During one of them, on the

24^(th) of September, a member of the “guardia civil” was killed, while

the culprit of the murder was seriously wounded. The Spanish police and

the press want people to believe that it was a bunch of gangsters. There

are at least 12 with charges against them, three of which are threatened

with the death penalty.

In reality the attack on the bank was part of a series of armed actions,

which started a few years ago by various amorphous autonomous groups in

the area of Barcelona. The purpose of these actions was to collect money

for the support of revolutionary activities in the workers’ movement.

Anyway, many of the groups signed their actions as “Autonomous Groups of

Struggle”, thus showing with the common signature the common character

of their actions, although they do not in fact consist of a single

structured organisation. These actions did not have a political purpose,

in the sense that politics consists of actions on others, they did not

aim for the coordination and organisation, the formation of recognised

power that seeks a position in society. The bank robberies did not turn

the bank robbers into vendettas of the spectacle, they did not aspire to

capture the imagination, but merely provided the material means for

action in a country where a large quantity is often needed. (For

example, illegality often makes the publication and circulation of texts

difficult and costly). Whoever blames them for their actions is even

further back than Proudhon, who knew that property = theft. Of course

theft does not destroy property. But it is a means — limited but useful

in many cases — for the organisation of the struggle against the world

of property. It is totally useless to express a priori judgements “in

favour” or “against” methods whose use is the matter of circumstances,

thus in the final analysis a matter of social conditions. These actions

cannot be made irrespective of time and place. It is not by chance that

in the beginning of the century the Russian revolutionaries resorted to

similar actions in a society swept by brutal repression, in a State

which — as the Spanish one today — did not hesitate to drown unarmed

workers in blood.

The materialist conception of violence excludes any principled position,

either in favour of these methods or against them. It does not invert

the principles of bourgeois society in order to transform terrorism into

an absolute good, nor does it condemn it as an absolute bad.

The revolutionary does not steal in order to give to the poor, like the

French maoists who distributed caviar to the immigrants. He steals in

order to satisfy a — social — need of the revolution. Of course, to the

degree that he explains his action (something that the Spanish comrades

did repeatedly by addressing those present in order to express the

purposes of the robbery), his action gains a new dimension. It reveals

the existence of another social movement, of a different dynamic within

society, and this revelation is subversive. But this is a consequence, a

mere secondary result. Those who resort to armed violence with the main

aim of wining over the spirits or the hearts in order to extort pressure

for their official recognition, either fail or they impose themselves as

the new power (for example: the Palestinian commandos in the first case,

the Irish IRA in the second).

In reality it is capital which by its very nature robs and expropriates,

stripping people from their environment at all levels. It denies people,

even things (see the polluted nature) from their being in order to

integrate them, it transforms them into its objects, its monsters —

since they are neither themselves nor solid spanners of capital — and

all they know is a divided life and society. It is very natural then

that those who rise against capital engage into all sorts of

re-appropriations: material, psychological, theoretical, and also

economic or financial. So long as capital exists, money remains the

privileged mediator of all social activity. So long as the enemy

triumphs it imposes its mediation everywhere, without exempting

revolutionary activities. In some cases, radical people or groups are

inevitably led to the violent appropriation of sums of value, even

though their purpose, their same logic and their being, directs itself

against all forms of value. This will surprise and scandalize only those

who do not need means for action simply because they are not active or

those who have a bureaucratic mechanism (state capitalist

organisations), or in the extreme cases those who have the support of a

State (like the Spanish Communist Party which is supported by Russia).

In parallel with the terrorist actions, the workers’ movement of

Barcelona developed an effective network of connections, especially with

the proletarian libraries and with the active engagement in the

autonomous workers’ struggles. We would have to remind that after the

double defeat of the proletariat (which was crushed after the

coordinated attacks of fascism and of anti-fascism), the Spanish

proletarian movement experienced a rise at the beginning of the 1960’s;

this rise was expressed in 1962–65 with the appearance of the “Workers

Committees”, as a direct result of the wave of spontaneous strikes which

started from the mines in the Asturias. In 1966–68 all the traditional

parties and organisations infiltrated the Workers’ Committees (in fact

the CP infiltrated in the state union C.N.S.), took control of their

leadership and transformed them into reformist structures. In between

1968 and 1970, the impact of the French and Italian movement, in

relation to the Spanish situation, caused within the Workers’ Committees

a series of ideological struggles, splits, and, in general, developments

in the direction of the extreme-left. After, in 1970–73, there is a rise

of workers’ struggles which refuse the bureaucratic and hierarchical

controls (burning of leaflets, kicking political members out of workers’

meetings, etc). Exactly this phenomenon is what the State is trying to

attack, by equalising all those charged and those in prison, which it

tries at the same time to destroy and to slander (one aim facilitates

the latter). It aims at the destruction of one of the expressions of the

autonomous action of the Spanish proletariat.

Decisively opposed to all forms of reformism and of democratic

anti-fascism, these groups and circles had as an eventual aim the

proletarian programme of abolishing wage labour and of exchange. It is

characteristic that they translated and distributed a series of French

communist texts, like J. Barrot’s study of the Russian Revolution, the

introduction of the book “La Bande a Baader”, an article of “Negation”,

and Beriou’s text about Ireland. Moreover, they showed a zealous

interest in reading Pannekoek and Bordiga, without however theoretically

following one or the other.

With the progress of these actions, some elements who have resorted to

robberies decided to abandon such activities. The robberies had proven

useful of course at the beginning of the movement (we are not able to

say whether their influence was decisive), but in the next phase they

were becoming increasingly pointless and dangerous. We ignore today why

and how the comrades who were arrested on the 16^(th) September

organised another robbery; we therefore refrain from forming an opinion

on the matter until more information is available. It is however certain

that the State aims with this chance of diminishing the seeds of the

totality of those activities” 1) by presenting the actions of armed

struggles as gangsterism, but mostly 2) by equalising the most radical

elements of the workers’ movement who had no relation with these actions

with the actual culprits. We have to do whatever is possible to make the

truth shine on these two points, without mixing them up.

Revolutionary violence is not another means that is used because other

means were proven to be ineffective. Neither is it a defense against an

attack, as if we always have to defend a violent action by presenting

ourselves as “defensive”. The theories of defensive violence simply play

the game of the enemy. Moreover, it is not an end in itself and does not

find its justification in itself. It is used (as material violence,

psychological violence, etc) for the accomplishment of an aim. In this

sense it belongs in every society, even in the communist one which will

include conflicts since every relation implies a conflict. Neither

harmony nor anarchy exist in an absolute and static situation; one

determines the other. In the communist society, individuals and groups —

who will have the capability of transforming their lives all the time —

will have conflicts and at the same time the means to deal with them

without hurting or mutilating others or themselves. The very content of

“violence” thus gets a sense so new, that the term is used here only for

technical reasons: it’s the language of the contemporary-prehistoric

society.

Violence is the essential character of the existing society against the

contradictory nature of capital. Even in periods of prosperity and peace

capital destroys goods and people, it leaves certain productive forces

unused, it creates hunger. It is well known that the car has killed more

French people than the 2^(nd) World War. Violence is also ideological:

forcing people to speak a specific language, erasing the local historic

past, imposition of a strictly defined sexual practice. Capital even

accomplishes the murder of the dead, i.e. of the past labour accumulated

by previous generations, when it neglects or destroys the material

infrastructure that it does not want or does not want to maintain.

Capital, simply through its function, deteriorates, and crushes the

bodies and spirits. The truncheon is an exemption. The “police State” is

a component element and the product of a much more generalised

phenomenon.

Collective resistance against capital includes violence as a means for

the destruction of oppressive social relations. Or actually, something

more: isolation is abolished in a collective practice that is, among

others, violent. During the revolution, the human community re-emerges

through violence. Violence is a means for the alteration of the

relations of production and its use towards that direction is a

collective act. Thus, violence becomes a positive way of refusing the

social organisation, from the moment it goes it turns against its roots.

Some individuals or groups are forced to organise the collective use of

violence in order to impose the satisfaction of their demands. In

contemporary France, rarely is the issue of revolutionary violence posed

in radical activities; but it becomes an issue of increasing vitality

when the struggle against the State, the left and of the extreme left,

takes the proportion of an open conflict and it is necessary to impose

yourself practically in order to be able to express and to develop

certain activities. In Spain, social relations promote a more pressured

need to resort to violence, including armed struggle: in this way

certain “military” duties are more pressing. But, even in this case,

violence is the result of social needs that cannot be met otherwise, and

not of the self-empowering logic of military mechanisms, cut off from

social life and composed of people who have understood the need to

resort to the armed struggle and as a consequence are organised and they

recruit for that purpose.

The movement is forced to resort to violence, and in the organisation of

this violence, in order to meet certain needs. Of course in this sector,

total improvisation leads to failure. But also a constant and

specialised organisational form will not have better results. The

“preparation” for the use of violence is not the task of organised

groups with exactly that perspective: it is a matter of bonds and means

that exists within the proletariat and through it. The proletariat is

not only the “outcast” and the negation of this society: in order to

refuse its condition, it puts into practice the very means that the

“proletarian experience” offers to it, its social existence and its

function. It finds within its own being the elements of its programme,

but also the means to realise it. At a social level, the armed struggle

is conducted mainly in the network of relations that are a consequence

of the proletariat’s existence. The “preparation” for revolt is mainly a

matter of theory, engagement in the social struggles, contribution to

the progress of certain ideas, creation of relations and contacts, etc.

There is no need for the creation of “specialised” military units with a

label and with an organisation aimed at the use of violence. Every

single action can be accomplished with the collaboration of individuals

and groups which are neither organisationally constructed nor

specialised; and it should be judged in accordance to its content and

not to the logic of specialised “military” groups. The need for a label

means that an organisation of armed struggle adopts as a criterion

violence itself and not activities connected to real needs. The Guevara

logic of guerilla fighting consists of exactly the creation of a

military pole unconnected to any social movement. When a group considers

itself the nucleus of a future “revolutionary” army, it acts outside of

the proletariat and in most cases against it; it thus tends to be

transformed into a micro-power, to a kind of preliminary State which

stands as a candidate for the replacement of the old state mechanism.

In Spain there is a direct connection between revolutionary activity and

“military” infrastructure, since every activity comes into conflict from

the very beginning with the military violence of the State (repression

of strikes, of gatherings/demonstrations, of the distribution of texts,

etc). The necessity of a “military” infrastructure, i.e. of an

organisation of violence, is thus obvious. But there exists a problem:

what sort of infrastructure? In our opinion this infrastructure should

not be an end in itself, but should be the instrument that allows the

realisation of the rest of the activities, because it is them that play

the decisive role. When for example a brochure is printed the problem is

for it to circulate, and not to maintain a “military” structure which

might be necessary for bringing it in the country from abroad. The

revolutionary organisation organises the various specific duties that

compose its reason of existence, and not itself. Its aim is not

hijacking struggles in order to include them into its accomplishments:

on the contrary, it makes sure that its activity theoretically and

materially belongs to all, and that it helps, to an increasing extent,

the initiatives which do not stem from itself and are beyond its

control. Political organisations do the exact opposite. It should be

added that the former way of organisation proves to be more effective

against repression.

Of course there can be groups of struggle, but only as means for the

class struggle. The purpose is the most effective possible expression of

the subversive perspectives within the social struggles — which include

the potential for armed struggle within this framework — and not the

existence of well-organised and ready-for-all military groups. In the

latter case, the groups that were formed outside the proletariat will

remain external to it. The organisation of the organisation, on the one

hand, and the organisation of the specific activities on the other,

result into totally different relations within the social movement and

the working class.

The practice of the Spanish revolutionaries did not aim either at the

formation of a military mechanism nor to terrorism against individuals

or buildings which represent the existing order of things, but the

accomplishment of a limited material function. But every activity

reproduces the conditions of its existence which tend to perpetuate it

beyond the limits of its function. The less powerful is the social

movement, the more the means are transformed into objectives. Thus the

organisation of armed activities in illegality tends to create its own

self-empowering logic: new financial needs, reasons for new robberies,

etc. The only way for one to escape this dynamic is to have a clear

conception of the targets of the movement. It is much more important to

create groups of workers and to perform robberies if they think that it

is useful, than to organise a military mechanism. The decisive criterion

is not either centralisation or autonomy: the importance lies in the

content of their activities. If they proclaim themselves as a constant

and specialised mechanism, they lose all contact with the social

struggles. There is the proletariat that struggles and there are

individuals who organise themselves and might potentially decide to

commit a robbery; not a military organisation from which stem all the

rest as logical consequences. When it is necessary the social movement

resorts to violence. And [translator’s note: illegible word], those who

do not use it, explain it and justify it theoretically.

The danger would be to recreate, under the pretext of practical

necessities, a new type of a professional revolutionary, who stands out

of the proletariat, not by inserting consciousness to it, but by

fulfilling a duty that the proletariat, “left to its own powers” is

unable to fulfil. We would thus revive “leninism”, by substituting a

violent act of the proletariat (to which we belong) the activity of

groups (whether centralised or autonomous) composed by specialists of

violence. The history of the movement shows that the groups of struggle

that are organised outside of the proletariat end up, regardless of

their good intentions, to autonomise themselves from the class struggle,

by recruiting people very different from revolutionary proletarians and

acting on their own behalf: for money, for self-projection or simply for

their survival. This is what happened to the Bolsheviks. The

understanding of the phenomenon is a necessary precondition of a radical

critique of leninism.

Revolt destroys people and goods, but with the purpose of destroying a

social relation and to the degree that it succeeds. Violence and

destruction are not identical. Violence is mainly the appropriation of

something with dynamic means. Revolutionary violence is a collective

appropriation. Although capital needs to destroy in order to triumph,

the communist movement on the contrary means the control of people over

their lives. The “positivist” or “rational” or “humanitarian”

conceptions neglect the real problem.

State-capitalists insist on the acquisition of power, whereas the point

is the acquisition of the ability to act, to transform the world and

ourselves. We do not need structures of power, but the power to change

the structures. Moreover, they speak about arming the proletariat

without connecting that to the content of the movement. Civil war plays

the game of capital when it does turn against it. The problem is not

arming the workers and their armed struggle, but the use of their

weapons against commodity relations and the State. Civil war is not the

absolute good opposed to the absolute bad of the imperialist war. A

civil war can be totally capitalist and in fact posits two factions of

the bourgeois state as opposed. The criterion for its evaluation should

be the productive relations and the army: so long as commodity

relations, and the military violence that upholds them, triumph, there

is no movement towards the direction of social subversion. We always

have to pose the question what does violence do, what do the workers do,

even if they are organised in militias; if they support a power that

maintains capital, it is nothing but a more developed form for the

integration of workers to the State. The war in Spain brought into

opposition two forms of the development of capital, different but

anti-proletarian nonetheless. As soon as the workers’ militias, that

were formed to fight Franco’s coup, accepted to be integrated in the

democratic State, they made peace and they prepared a double defeat:

against Democracy (crushing of the proletariat of Barcelona in May 1937)

and against the nationalists. In this case the proletarian movement was

once again a matter of content and only after that a matter of form.

In non-revolutionary periods, radical groups may have as a duty — among

others and when it is needed — an organised violent practice. But they

cannot act as an armed faction or a military part of the proletariat.

Simply these revolutionaries remain proletarians like the others, who

are led to enter a moment of armed struggle that results in a certain

degree of illegality. The danger is for them to consider themselves as a

separate and autonomous group, destined to use violence indefinitely. If

they proclaim themselves and they act as specialists of violence, they

will have a monopoly over it and they will detach themselves from the

real social needs that exist in the subversive movement. Indeed they

will tend not even to express their own needs. In relation to the rest

of the proletariat, they will be transformed into a new power which

seeks its recognition, as a mechanism which is at first military and

then political.

The term “terrorism” could be used in a wide sense as the use of

terrorism: in this sense capital is by nature terroristic. In the narrow

sense, as a particular practice or some times strategy, it is the

application of violence in the vulnerable parts of society. When it is

not a constituent element of a social movement it leads to a violence

detached from social relations. In countries where there is a harsh

repression and in which the working class is atomised, there is a

dynamic of terrorism in the cities that soon appears as the conflict

between two mechanisms: of course victory belongs to the State. In the

same way as workers often consider political struggles as a world above

them, they often observe the conflict between the State and the

terrorists, counting the victims. In the best of cases they feel a moral

solidarity. We can in fact wonder if this conflict doesn’t actually help

in maintaining the social problem as secondary.

The means can potentially be transformed into the aim: here’s a truth

that does not only apply to violence. Theory, for example, a means for

understanding and acting more effectively, can be reduced to a

substitute for action. The results of this phenomenon are nonetheless

very serious in the case of violence. Nobody can play with the “armed

struggle”. There are actions which, even though the point is not to

“condemn” them (that is the function of judges), we can neither support

them or consider them a positive fact. Capital desires the

self-destruction of radical minorities. It forces certain

revolutionaries to feel that they can no longer stand it: a way of

neutralising them is to force them to take up arms against it. We are

not referring to “agent provocateurs”, but to social pressure. In such a

case we cannot say that certain comrades were forced to act in this way

and that’s all. For a function of the social movement, as well as of the

revolutionary groups, is to organise the resistance against these

pressures. Of course theory does not fix everything. The understanding

of a thing does not mean that a correspondent practice will follow. But

theory is a part of practice and that we cannot ignore. Those who

condone or refuse to criticise any violent act, fall into the trap of

capital.

There are two illusions. It is thought that violence, because it is more

directly related with reality, transforms it more than, for example,

texts. But violence, in the same way as texts, can be used as a

substitute of another practice. To be revolutionary has as a criterion a

real tendency towards subverting the existent. Baader initially wanted

to awaken the German proletariat, but he found himself isolated, not

numerically but socially. At this point we have to deal with the other

illusion, concerning the violence of the “masses”. The criterion is

never numerical. A small numbered minority can accomplish positive

violent actions, if it is part of a social movement (something that

applies to non-violent acts as well). Subversive action does not need to

find refuge within the masses nor does it try to impress them with

particular actions. By definition, those who oppose “minority violence”

to the “violence of the masses”, use the term masses while referring to

the mechanisms that organise them, the big parties and the trade unions.

The more contradictory society becomes, the more it separates and

atomises people, the more it intensifies the need for a community.

Violence is revolutionary and it contributes to the formation of the

human community only when it attacks against the foundations of the

existing society. When it merely maintains illusions of

pseudo-community, it is counter-revolutionary and it leads either to the

destruction of subversive groups or to their transformation into extra

power structures.

These observations are nothing but a small contribution to the

discussion of the problem and they were collected hastily with the

purpose of helping the Spanish comrades. Those imprisoned need, on the

one hand, the truth to shine in relation to the revolutionary character

of their energies and also the press to be notified of their case so

that pressure can be exerted to the court; on the other hand, the

revolutionary movement has to take care of their defence and the

clarification of their actions. “Revolutionary” help cannot but come

from the subversive elements themselves. In fact the second duty is a

precondition for the first one, for it is not possible to expect the

left or the extreme-left to essentially help people who fight against

them.

Solidarity has no meaning outside of a practice: for that reason the

usual campaigns “against repression” are by definition self-advertising

actions of the organisations undertaking them. The individual can only

offer his sympathy and the organisations that specialise in solidarity

gather these individuals without doing anything. Solidarity suffices

itself with organising solidarity. It is in fact highly reactionary when

it condemns “scandals”, at the moment when the supposed scandalous fact

is a simple result of a cause which is conveniently placed outside the

scope of critique. They thus end up denouncing or re-arranging the most

obvious facts of social repression, while at the same time they save or

modernise the whole.

Properly speaking the revolutionary movement does not organise any

particular support. Its members — individuals or groups — support each

other naturally through their activities and give each other the

necessary help. The problem of “support” is only existent for those

outside of the revolutionary movement. The subversive movement supports

only those who need help through deepening its action, both in the field

of relations and contacts and in the field of theory.

It goes without saying that when we fight for the accused to have a

“political” trial we do not demand any sort of privilege for the

“political” prisoners as opposed to the “criminal” prisoners. We might

identify in their gangsterism capital’s extreme tendency to live with

clear cons and to create businesses without capital, and in turn show

that the accused of Barcelona are not gangsters. Yet that is far from

demanding any form of superiority of the “political” prisoners as

against the “criminal” ones. As if any person who knows how to reproduce

some Marx quotes has an advantage over others!! “Political” prisoners

are not superior from the others. We do not demand this quality to be

recognised in the name of a principle, but as a tactical means for

decreasing their penalties.