Three fragments on ‘the militant’
Three fragments on ‘the militant’
The following are extracts taken from the Antología del anarcosindicalismo (Montady: Ediciones Ruta-BASE, 1988), a remarkable volume put together by Víctor García (Germinal Gracia). The book consists of one hundred entries on themes related to anarcho-syndicalism, which range from ‘Abstentionism’ to ‘Violence’ (to which is dedicated three sections: State violence; Violence as a necessary evil; and Negative violence). Each entry consists of a set of quotations taken from a range of two hundred different authors, and the book contains many citations and translations from rare and underused sources.
What follows are three of the citations included under the entry for ‘Militante’.
Juan Gómez Casas, from the Prologue to Anselmo Lorenzo, El proletariado militante (Bilbao: Zero, 1974), p. 18 (p. 337 in García).
It was logical that the libertarian sections of the International would give rise to a new type of activist – the militant – an example of the prefiguration that we have referred to, in the same way that the party structure favours the creation of the leader. On this basis the so-called authoritarian and anti-authoritarian currents of socialism have been constructed. The militant organises daily activity at the base of their organisation and moves from the concrete to the abstract in the forging of revolutionary theory. At no time do they allow their activity to escape their control or to be influenced or mediated by an external influence supposedly possessed of the laws that determine historical development. Both day-to-day activity and the most transcendental revolutionary plan result from the concerted action and collective responsibility of all the working-class militants, whose status in the organisation is the same. Collective decision making is the rule for taking action. Consequently – here we see the coincidence of means and ends – action is always articulated in such a way that it does not contradict the desired goal. Herein lies the rejection of the state, which in all its variations creates subjects, and of parliamentary politics, which creates ‘the national interest’, and initiates adepts into the ‘secret politics of governments’, which is thereby made into a private activity for elites. We therefore accord to the militant proletariat paramount importance. Contrary to appearances, we believe that in this sense anarchism demonstrated greater coherence than any other political grouping on the Spanish left before 1936, a date on which it learned at its own expense (through collaboration with the Republican government) the lessons that it had been attempting to disseminate for close to seventy years.
Andrée Andrieux and Jean Lignon, Le Militant Syndicaliste d’aujourd’hui (Paris: Denoël, 1973), p. 31 (p. 340 in García).
Not everyone is a militant, even if they find themselves involved in occasional conflicts related to the revolutionary movement. Those who ‘once put up a fly poster, sold a paper, supported a strike’, even those who formed picket lines, or ‘who died in Fourmies’[1] are not, for that reason, a militant, by contrast to what [Jean] Maitron says in his study. He himself recognised that this definition of militant lacked something essential: that continuity of activity which, we want to emphasise, forms a part of their commitment. In the prologue to Dictionnaire du Militant, which he wrote four years later, in collaboration with Jean Dautry, we read: ‘A militant is not a worker who occasionally takes part in a movement, or who accepts on one occasion temporary responsibilities in a stable organisation. Militancy is synonymous with continuity’. For the participant to become a militant, it is necessary for the action to be something more than an episode.
José Peirats, ‘Confederación Nacional del Trabajo’, in Enciclopedia Anarquista (Mexico: Editorial Tierra y Libertad, 1972-1985), p. 547 (p. 339 in García).
It would be a crass error to imagine that the CNT can be reduced to a few dozen men at the top. Its true strength resided in a wellspring of anonymous militants, who wrote infrequently and expressed themselves crudely. Situated between the great mass of the membership and the famous higher-ups, these were the ones who carried the weight of the organisation at its base, in direct contact with the factories, alternating their syndicalist mission with their role as professional workers. They organised and populated the technical sections, they studied and proposed campaigns, and bore the sharp end of conflicts, often paying with their lives. They were the ones who gave an example of sacrifice and austerity. These mid-level militants constituted, in successive generations, a great reserve of energies for the organisation, regardless of the fact that they were burned out in abundance. When the unions were closed by the authorities, activity persisted underground thanks to this ant’s nest of militants, which the police could never penetrate.
[1] A town in the north of France where soldiers killed nine peaceful demonstrators on 1 May 1891.