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We, the Anarchists!: A Study of the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI) 1927-1937
"Christie's polemic underscores a great truth about the struggle against fascism: There is no middle ground. You may either resist fascism with all your might, or fall into the same abyss yourself."--Rain Taxi
A detailed, scholarly study of the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI), a group of twentieth-century militants dedicated to keeping Spain’s largest labor union, the CNT, on a revolutionary, anarcho-syndicalist path. Stuart Christie’s analysis covers the history of Spanish anarchism and the Spanish Civil War, and provides lessons relevant to today’s largely neutered labor movement. A gripping and informative tale!
Stuart Christie is the co-founder of Anarchist Black Cross and Cienfuegos Press, and the author of Granny Made Me an Anarchist. He was imprisoned in 1964 for attempting to assassinate Spanish dictator Francisco Franco.
A detailed, scholarly study of the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI), a group of twentieth-century militants dedicated to keeping Spain’s largest labor union, the CNT, on a revolutionary, anarcho-syndicalist path. Stuart Christie’s analysis covers the history of Spanish anarchism and the Spanish Civil War, and provides lessons relevant to today’s largely neutered labor movement. A gripping and informative tale!
Stuart Christie is the co-founder of Anarchist Black Cross and Cienfuegos Press, and the author of Granny Made Me an Anarchist. He was imprisoned in 1964 for attempting to assassinate Spanish dictator Francisco Franco.
180 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 1996
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About the author
Stuart Christie
55 books29 followersStuart Christie was a Scottish anarchist writer and publisher. As an 18-year-old Christie was arrested while carrying explosives to assassinate the Spanish caudillo General Franco. He was later alleged to be a member of the Angry Brigade, but was acquitted of related charges. He went on to found the Cienfuegos Press publishing house and in 2008 the online Anarchist Film Channel which hosts films and documentaries with anarchist and libertarian themes.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
February 1, 2016
Stuart Christie's history of the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI) is a fascinating, engaging, contradictory, and problematic text. Christie's book is a polemic that seeks to defend the FAI from an anarchist critique that the wrote off the organization as a top-down organization alien to the anarchist tradition. Christie takes on the difficult task of defending the organization while also taking into account the fact that at the height of the Spanish Revolution many leading cadres of the organization took the FAI/CNT into the bourgeois coalition government.
In order to explain this contradiction Christie makes the argument that the FAI formed as organized political force to rid a reformist tendency within the CNT led by Angel Pestana. Then he argues the FAI "dissolved and ceased to exist" within the CNT. He argues that Diego Abdad de Santillan revived it around the time of the attempted fascist coup but then used to transform the organization into a hierarchical cabal that led to its class-collaborationist turn.
This is where Christie's book meets problems. First I think it is internally contradictory. He will conclude a chapter by talking about the FAI ceasing to exist and then begin the next chapter with a speech by Durrutti in that same time period praising the FAI. This point seems a difficult one to prove conclusively but for Christie everything rides on this because the only way he can indicate that the politics of anarchism had nothing to do with the failure in Spain he must draw a line through the FAI and indicate that there is no continuity. To me--and I need to go back and read Pierats--this seems suspect.
Additionally the counter-argument that Christie makes is that the reason why the FAI of Abdad de Santillan was able to steer the organization down the wrong road was because it was organized. This completely contradicts what he sees as the positive consequence of the earlier phase in which anarchists formed a separate political organization within the CNT Union in order to campaign on a political point against reformism. If it worked then why did this not happen again ins response to Abdad de Santillan? Christie cannot answer this and it is the flaw of the book. The reason is that he is not able to surpass the contradiction that he is on hand using the positive example of a separate political-revolutionary organization but on the other saying that is the cause. Instead Christie falls back on tired insurrectionary tropes of calling for less organization, and more morals and principles. He praises the "conscious minority" within the FAI who wanted to argue for a break with the bourgeois government and move toward communism but indicates that they should not had an organized vehicle to push this agenda forward.
Lastly he praises the Friends of Durutti as the best example of the "conscious minority" but skips over the fact that they argued for a revolutionary junta not dissimilar from the anarchist dictatorship that he loudly decries.
This book is fascinating though flawed and my opinion is that Christie inadvertently proves things he consciously attempts to disprove. He gets around this problem by moralizing about principles. Worth reading but do so critically.
In order to explain this contradiction Christie makes the argument that the FAI formed as organized political force to rid a reformist tendency within the CNT led by Angel Pestana. Then he argues the FAI "dissolved and ceased to exist" within the CNT. He argues that Diego Abdad de Santillan revived it around the time of the attempted fascist coup but then used to transform the organization into a hierarchical cabal that led to its class-collaborationist turn.
This is where Christie's book meets problems. First I think it is internally contradictory. He will conclude a chapter by talking about the FAI ceasing to exist and then begin the next chapter with a speech by Durrutti in that same time period praising the FAI. This point seems a difficult one to prove conclusively but for Christie everything rides on this because the only way he can indicate that the politics of anarchism had nothing to do with the failure in Spain he must draw a line through the FAI and indicate that there is no continuity. To me--and I need to go back and read Pierats--this seems suspect.
Additionally the counter-argument that Christie makes is that the reason why the FAI of Abdad de Santillan was able to steer the organization down the wrong road was because it was organized. This completely contradicts what he sees as the positive consequence of the earlier phase in which anarchists formed a separate political organization within the CNT Union in order to campaign on a political point against reformism. If it worked then why did this not happen again ins response to Abdad de Santillan? Christie cannot answer this and it is the flaw of the book. The reason is that he is not able to surpass the contradiction that he is on hand using the positive example of a separate political-revolutionary organization but on the other saying that is the cause. Instead Christie falls back on tired insurrectionary tropes of calling for less organization, and more morals and principles. He praises the "conscious minority" within the FAI who wanted to argue for a break with the bourgeois government and move toward communism but indicates that they should not had an organized vehicle to push this agenda forward.
Lastly he praises the Friends of Durutti as the best example of the "conscious minority" but skips over the fact that they argued for a revolutionary junta not dissimilar from the anarchist dictatorship that he loudly decries.
This book is fascinating though flawed and my opinion is that Christie inadvertently proves things he consciously attempts to disprove. He gets around this problem by moralizing about principles. Worth reading but do so critically.
June 14, 2017
I had to take about a five month break in the middle of reading this, because classes and my job started up. All in all, it's a good book.
There are a number of problems, and unfortunately, I don't have simple answers for a lot of them. For example, Christie's analysis relies highly upon criticisms that Federica Montseny was a rising star in FAI leadership, who sold out the anarchist base. However, this presumes Montseny was a member; she held delegate status and posts at times. It makes sense, right? But Bookchin's acclaimed The Spanish Anarchists 1998 reprint notes that he (Bookchin), also made this erroneous presumption, noting that Montseny denied FAI membership. Was she lying? It's tough to tell. Likewise, Christie occasionally implies (seemingly intentionally) that Durruti may not have held FAI membership status, even though he marched as its leading voice and delegate on multiple occasions.
Christie depicts Pestana as an evolving character. Other accounts (Abel Paz's Durruti biography, Bookchin's Spanish Anarchists, or just Wikipedia) recount his existence as a more consistent syndicalist looking for a place to politically reside. These other accounts seem much less dramatic, while Christie's seems to dramatize a person to make his analytical point that professional revolutionaries become bureaucratic functionaries.
I really hoped Christie would have provided more in the area of answers at the end, in relation to the common criticisms of anarchist treatment of the Civil War conflicts: Should they have had clearly defined strategies for addressing an antifascist Popular Front, and if so, could discipline be enforced to allow executive organizational authority to refuse such participation? He claims Durruti makes an argument about bargaining with the Antifascist Militias for FAI prisoners, almost dismissing this as an equal position to Montseny's. I would have liked to have seen the answers part of the book flushed out more. Christie occasionally admires the autonomy of Bakuninist structures - one that most anarchist groups today regard as outdated or at least in need of more detail for use.
Speaking of Bakuninist dogma, on page 189-190, Christie recounts a vote where an anarchist in the Bakuninist First International tradition of The Alliance were nominated and elected from their CNT union to serve as Regional Secretary in the Catalan CNT, declined it. Then, the seat was appointed to the runner up, who also declined it, keeping with The Alliance's tradition of rejecting union official positions. Then, the position went to someone Garcia Oliver had nominated as a joke in a union local - Mariano Vasquez - who was unsuited and didn't really want the position. Vasquez was the model member to not hold office, and the power of the CNT was driven into the hands of those most willing to hold it. Given this reality, which is a common criticism of the anarchists in Spain (and goes along with Montseny's abstention to take power in Catalonia), it begs an answer from Christie about what should have been done differently.
When they participate in leading, he claims they inevitably become co-opted as bureaucrats. When they abstain, they hand the revolution over to liberals for reform and patty-cake with fascists. What is Christie's solution here?
Christie really goes after Diego Abad de Santillán as an academic reformist bureaucrat in the FAI, but never really details his contributions to anarchist economic theory or his milestone economic planning proposal at the Third CNT Congress. I get that de Santillán was not writing for the rank-and-file, but he was trying to prepare the FAI to address the CNT on how to organize the economy to defend the revolution and establish a just planned economy that would not falter the way the Soviet Union did. Instead, Christie continually relegates him to the camp of the perpetual bureaucrat.
Christie quotes a lot at length, but if you're looking to find some good primary source samples, see Abel Paz's Durruti biography. He quotes at length, juxtaposing multiple perspectives before going after them.
Parts of the book's claims about the quantitative strength and weakness of the FAI are difficult to assess. FAI membership was secret. How are we to evaluate heroism as driving a mass recruitment and swelling of membership, when the numbers aren't there? This is perhaps an unfair criticism, as members did account of its growth, but this is possibly the most consistently bothering criticism in the book. Whenever a FAI member is criticized, I can't help but wonder if they were really a member. Kind of kidding, kind of not with that comment.
Christie seems to gloss over the POUM on multiple occasions, I'm guessing because they're inconvenient for his slurring of Marxists. The POUM had most of the same debates, reservations, and flaws by entering the Popular Front. Most of the criticisms and praises during the Revolution would apply to both, but he largely just refers to "Marxists," as if Nin, Negrin, Maura, and Caballero were all conspiring to silence the FAI declare them an illegal organization. This analysis omits facts for anarchist analytical convenience.
I recommend the book, but I would place it below Bookchin's Spanish Anarchists and Paz's Durruti on the must read.
There are a number of problems, and unfortunately, I don't have simple answers for a lot of them. For example, Christie's analysis relies highly upon criticisms that Federica Montseny was a rising star in FAI leadership, who sold out the anarchist base. However, this presumes Montseny was a member; she held delegate status and posts at times. It makes sense, right? But Bookchin's acclaimed The Spanish Anarchists 1998 reprint notes that he (Bookchin), also made this erroneous presumption, noting that Montseny denied FAI membership. Was she lying? It's tough to tell. Likewise, Christie occasionally implies (seemingly intentionally) that Durruti may not have held FAI membership status, even though he marched as its leading voice and delegate on multiple occasions.
Christie depicts Pestana as an evolving character. Other accounts (Abel Paz's Durruti biography, Bookchin's Spanish Anarchists, or just Wikipedia) recount his existence as a more consistent syndicalist looking for a place to politically reside. These other accounts seem much less dramatic, while Christie's seems to dramatize a person to make his analytical point that professional revolutionaries become bureaucratic functionaries.
I really hoped Christie would have provided more in the area of answers at the end, in relation to the common criticisms of anarchist treatment of the Civil War conflicts: Should they have had clearly defined strategies for addressing an antifascist Popular Front, and if so, could discipline be enforced to allow executive organizational authority to refuse such participation? He claims Durruti makes an argument about bargaining with the Antifascist Militias for FAI prisoners, almost dismissing this as an equal position to Montseny's. I would have liked to have seen the answers part of the book flushed out more. Christie occasionally admires the autonomy of Bakuninist structures - one that most anarchist groups today regard as outdated or at least in need of more detail for use.
Speaking of Bakuninist dogma, on page 189-190, Christie recounts a vote where an anarchist in the Bakuninist First International tradition of The Alliance were nominated and elected from their CNT union to serve as Regional Secretary in the Catalan CNT, declined it. Then, the seat was appointed to the runner up, who also declined it, keeping with The Alliance's tradition of rejecting union official positions. Then, the position went to someone Garcia Oliver had nominated as a joke in a union local - Mariano Vasquez - who was unsuited and didn't really want the position. Vasquez was the model member to not hold office, and the power of the CNT was driven into the hands of those most willing to hold it. Given this reality, which is a common criticism of the anarchists in Spain (and goes along with Montseny's abstention to take power in Catalonia), it begs an answer from Christie about what should have been done differently.
When they participate in leading, he claims they inevitably become co-opted as bureaucrats. When they abstain, they hand the revolution over to liberals for reform and patty-cake with fascists. What is Christie's solution here?
Christie really goes after Diego Abad de Santillán as an academic reformist bureaucrat in the FAI, but never really details his contributions to anarchist economic theory or his milestone economic planning proposal at the Third CNT Congress. I get that de Santillán was not writing for the rank-and-file, but he was trying to prepare the FAI to address the CNT on how to organize the economy to defend the revolution and establish a just planned economy that would not falter the way the Soviet Union did. Instead, Christie continually relegates him to the camp of the perpetual bureaucrat.
Christie quotes a lot at length, but if you're looking to find some good primary source samples, see Abel Paz's Durruti biography. He quotes at length, juxtaposing multiple perspectives before going after them.
Parts of the book's claims about the quantitative strength and weakness of the FAI are difficult to assess. FAI membership was secret. How are we to evaluate heroism as driving a mass recruitment and swelling of membership, when the numbers aren't there? This is perhaps an unfair criticism, as members did account of its growth, but this is possibly the most consistently bothering criticism in the book. Whenever a FAI member is criticized, I can't help but wonder if they were really a member. Kind of kidding, kind of not with that comment.
Christie seems to gloss over the POUM on multiple occasions, I'm guessing because they're inconvenient for his slurring of Marxists. The POUM had most of the same debates, reservations, and flaws by entering the Popular Front. Most of the criticisms and praises during the Revolution would apply to both, but he largely just refers to "Marxists," as if Nin, Negrin, Maura, and Caballero were all conspiring to silence the FAI declare them an illegal organization. This analysis omits facts for anarchist analytical convenience.
I recommend the book, but I would place it below Bookchin's Spanish Anarchists and Paz's Durruti on the must read.
October 24, 2016
It helps to be familiar with the events of the Spanish Civil War and of the times leading up to it before actually reading this short book. After reading this, I am only left with more questions. Why did Angel Pestana wield so much power in a supposedly highly democratic union who did not agree with his "reformist" tactics? He claims the FAI was created in response to Pestana and other "reformers" who would abandon the stated anarchist principles of the CNT yet the CNT voted to, for example, participate in elections ~twice~. Not only that, but Abed de Santiallan was later able to take over the FAI and steer it into a completely different direction that was supposedly contrary to the majority of the memberships' beliefs and actions. If it was a radically democratic anarchistic organization, how was all this able to materialize?
May 14, 2016
Without a doubt Stuart Christie's anatomy of the heyday of the famous yet flawed Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI) of the Spanish Revolution is the most incisive and erudite study in the English language.
Arrested in Madrid in 1964 with a backpack full of explosives intended for an assassination attempt on Generalissimo Francisco Franco and only narrowly avoiding the garrotte thanks to an international campaign mounted by the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre, Christie certainly demonstrated his life-long commitment to the anarchist cause.
But for such a colourful character to have produced in this disarmingly slender volume the best partisan account of the defining ideological battle of the 20th Century, that between anarchism and fascism, is remarkable.
Backed up by a wealth of detail, Christie rigorously critiques a FAI that is too often obscured in the minds of many anarchists by shallow hagiography.
In particular, he examines the tensions between the FAI fear of establishing an "anarchist dictatorship" when the opportunity presented itself in July 1936, and the shocking transformation of the FAI into a conventional bureaucratic party in 1937, both of which were to prove fatal to the Revolution.
Read it and weep? No, read it and learn, for direct application to the libertarian communist Revolution currently underway in Rojava against the Islamic State fascists.
Arrested in Madrid in 1964 with a backpack full of explosives intended for an assassination attempt on Generalissimo Francisco Franco and only narrowly avoiding the garrotte thanks to an international campaign mounted by the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre, Christie certainly demonstrated his life-long commitment to the anarchist cause.
But for such a colourful character to have produced in this disarmingly slender volume the best partisan account of the defining ideological battle of the 20th Century, that between anarchism and fascism, is remarkable.
Backed up by a wealth of detail, Christie rigorously critiques a FAI that is too often obscured in the minds of many anarchists by shallow hagiography.
In particular, he examines the tensions between the FAI fear of establishing an "anarchist dictatorship" when the opportunity presented itself in July 1936, and the shocking transformation of the FAI into a conventional bureaucratic party in 1937, both of which were to prove fatal to the Revolution.
Read it and weep? No, read it and learn, for direct application to the libertarian communist Revolution currently underway in Rojava against the Islamic State fascists.
July 26, 2012
This is a very good book. It's really good for radical union activists understanding the conservative forces within the union hierarchy, how anarchists should fight against those conservative forces, and how even the most anarchist of organizations can be submittable to the same kind of forces. Diego Abad de Santillán doesn't come out of the book particularly good, as a efficiency obsessed technocrat. Same with Federica Montseny, the two being the chief architects of trying to end the anarchist revolution while the revolutionary workers where putting Libertarian Communism into practice.
November 26, 2018
Stuart Christie offers a partisan and passionate account of the FAI in his "We, the Anarchists! A study of the Iberian Anarchist Federation'. The power of Christie's account comes form his intimate knowledge of the various debates, and contradictions of various aspects of the FAI, the CNT, radical history, and the larger context of Spanish Revolution/Civil War. Likewise, his partisan-that is anarchist-perspective is outline in the preface so that the reader knowns where he is coming from and where he is headed.
Although Christie is writing a history of the FAI from a sympathetic perspective, he is still critical and writes in the prefaces that he sees the contradictions that emerge from a revolutionary organization that is trying to resist state institutions as sometimes replicating those same hierarchal characteristics. This tension is representative of the relationship between the FAI and the CNT leadership sometimes called the 'higher committees', rather than as often presented between the FAI and the CNT (rank and file) itself. Christie makes clear that the FAI emerges as an explicitly anarchist organization whose members were also member of the CNT instead of outsider attempting to infiltrate and take over the organization as some have argued. The purpose of the FAI was to ensure that the CNT maintained its radical constitution that was explicitly committed to anarchist communism since the Madrid conference in December 1919.
Christie's account was extremely illuminating of the ways that the internal struggles of the CNT mapped onto the external struggles (and tenuous relationships) between the anarchist left and various other left organizations such as the POUM, PSUC, UGT, etc. Each organization seemed to want the same thing as the others, to defeat fascism and push forward the revolution. However, everyone disagree with the means to reach it, if and when to compromise or collaborate, and obviously what the end goal of revolution actually looked like.
Although Christie is writing a history of the FAI from a sympathetic perspective, he is still critical and writes in the prefaces that he sees the contradictions that emerge from a revolutionary organization that is trying to resist state institutions as sometimes replicating those same hierarchal characteristics. This tension is representative of the relationship between the FAI and the CNT leadership sometimes called the 'higher committees', rather than as often presented between the FAI and the CNT (rank and file) itself. Christie makes clear that the FAI emerges as an explicitly anarchist organization whose members were also member of the CNT instead of outsider attempting to infiltrate and take over the organization as some have argued. The purpose of the FAI was to ensure that the CNT maintained its radical constitution that was explicitly committed to anarchist communism since the Madrid conference in December 1919.
Christie's account was extremely illuminating of the ways that the internal struggles of the CNT mapped onto the external struggles (and tenuous relationships) between the anarchist left and various other left organizations such as the POUM, PSUC, UGT, etc. Each organization seemed to want the same thing as the others, to defeat fascism and push forward the revolution. However, everyone disagree with the means to reach it, if and when to compromise or collaborate, and obviously what the end goal of revolution actually looked like.
May 17, 2009
love the author..love the subject..cant wait
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