#OtD in 1960, Catalan anarchist guerrilla Quico Sabaté was finally shot down by the fascists after thirty years of combat against capitalism. As a teenager he joined the CNT to organize his workplace (several factories, working as a mechanic), and with his brothers...
Read more Image
he created an affinity group within the FAI. In Jan 1933, he participated in the insurrection organized by the CNT, in 1935 his affinity group carried out their first expropriation to raise money for prisoners. When the Civil War broke out in 1936 he went with a FAI militia to
the Aragón front, he was accused of killing a communist commissar who was withholding armaments from the anarchist columns, allowing the fascists to take Teruel, was imprisoned, escaped, went back to the front to continue fighting the fascists, escaped to France Image
when the war was lost in 1939, was put in a concentration camp by the French together with hundreds of thousamds of other refugees, gained his release by working in an explosives factory, moved to a village in the Pyrenees to begin preparing clandestine routes across the border. Image
He made his first trip into Francoist Spain in 1944. Thus began his life as a guerrilla.
The anarchist guerrillas practiced "armed agitation," carrying out expropriations, sabotage, and attacks in order to support the broader anticapitalist struggle Image
rather than trying to make themselves the protagonists or vanguard of that struggle. They stole money for strike funds and prisoners' families, assaulted and threatened particularly abusive bosses in front of the workers, destroyed power lines, assassinated police officials,
broke people out of prison (including saving people from the extermination camps the fascists were running), distributed illegal pamphlets, and organized several assassination attempts on Franco, all of it as a complement to workplace and neighborhood organizing rather than Image
a substitute. Hundreds of anarchist guerrillas and supporters were killed in this struggle (including Quico's brothers) and many more imprisoned. There were also guerrilla movements, communist as well as anarchist, in Euskadi, Aragón, Galicia, Andalucía, and Madrid. Image
The CNT eventually withdrew their support for the guerrilla campaign, but Sabaté's group and several other groups continued.
When Quico heard a comrade had been imprisoned late in 1959, he prepared his last journey, going with his group in a rescue attempt.
The French police regularly passed their fascist Spanish colleagues intelligence on the anarchist groups, but around New Years', Quico's group managed to evade patrols on both sides of the border. But on January 4, the five anarchists were surrounded
by over one hundred Guardia Civil at a small farmhouse in the mountains, Mas Clarà. The police laid down intensive fire for hours, killing Antoni Miracle Guitart, Roger Madrigal Torres, Francisco Conesa Alcaraz and Martín Ruiz Montoya. Quico Sabaté had three bullet wounds, Image
but under cover of darkness he snuck away, injuring one Guardia Civil and killing a lieutenant in his escape. Severely injured, he made it dozens of kilometers through the snowy mountains, crossed the river Ter, boarded a train, leapt off when he was discovered, and eventually
made it to the town of Sant Celoni. By now his wounds were gangrenous and Quico was disoriented. As he searched for a doctor who supported the cause, a fascist found him and shot him dead. He was dumped in an unmarked grave, which comrades later located and memorialized. Image
The last Catalan maqui, Ramon Vila Capdevila, was killed 3 years later but their memory & practice inspired the next generation of anticapitalists who would begin to take action in the middle of the 60s.
There's a forthcoming book on this next generation's struggle @AKPressDistro Image
Socialists have tried to limit the legacy of these guerrillas as mere antifascists, and Catalan nationalists have tried to recast them as champions of political independence, but their struggle was always against capitalism and the State in all its forms.

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More from @PeterGelderloos

7 Jan
Strategy notes.
If the Republicans decide today to remove Trump, Democrats will embrace them and the renewal of democracy will feature extreme centrism. Fascists will be left without electoral expression and will seek other avenues.
If Reps don't, Democrats will pursue...
Thread
legal action in 2 weeks. They will strongly differentiate themselves from Reps through some progressive policies and mostly symbolic action that includes repressive measures against all "extremists", Right and Left. Either way, they will find ways to increase repression against
antiracist & anticapitalist rebellion, with greater use of cooptation in 2nd scenario.
Trump is done for now, but if he and his principals aren't punished/banned, electoral Trumpism could come back in 2 years.
On the ground: important to thwart fascist attempts
Read 5 tweets
7 Jan
I hope everyone is making a distinction between feeling worried about what these fascists might do after they leave the Capitol (legit), and being troubled by what they are doing at the Capitol. We're not here to defend politicians or symbols of power. And we shouldn't be...
surprised anymore that fascists get kiddy glove treatment from the cops and unarmed National Guards. Seriously.
Also, I hope anarchists aren't spreading the hyperbolic rhetoric that this is a coup. A real coup takes organization and strategy. It's not a coincidence that...
Republican politicians were some of the first to call this a coup. Because the antidote to a coup is a renewal of democracy. It's a chance for all these politicians to give themselves a face lift.
Remember, democracy has been doing genocide, repression, and immiseration for
Read 4 tweets
6 Jan
The US has selective amnesia for the violence of white supremacists, so the far Right won't be marginalized in the long term, but this half-assed MAGA riot will present Republicans an opportunity to distance themselves from Trump and clean up their image, wash away...
...their sins of the last 4 years and opt for reinventing their Party (and the Right). They'd still have to win a war for the rank-and-file. Or they may try hedge their bets, which would allow Trump to hold onto influence in the Party.
For a long time Republican pollsters have...
been saying the Party's been betting on a shrinking demographic. Now that they're in the minority across the board, they may decide on a shake up. The Democrats on the other hand will call for renewed centrist unity.
So the fascists are going to be more isolated but more extreme,
Read 5 tweets
25 Dec 20
This visual aid helps demonstrate why "dictatorship of the proletariat" is such a nonsense idea.
The bourg in the blue triangle, after the rev: are they dead, totally expropriated? Then there's no more bourg, no blue, no one to dictate to.
Is there still a bourgeoisie...
...dominated by the State? Then capitalist relations and means of production still exist on some level and what you have is state capitalism. This is what Lenin did, it was great for economic growth, neither capitalism nor the state "withered away." This is a loss for specific...
...capitalists but a win for capitalism.
What about the red base? Are the means of subsistence communalized & alienation abolished? Then necessarily ALL the proletariat participates in the organization of society, relations are horizontal, reciprocal, there is no dictatorship.
Read 9 tweets
20 Nov 20
#OtD in 1936, Buenaventura Durruti died on the Madrid front of the Spanish Civil War. He had been a lifelong anarchist expropriator, assassin, union organizer, and at the end, militia leader, advancing a revolutionary, working class methodology for fighting fascism. Image
For propaganda reasons, it was said he was felled by a fascist bullet, though this is contradicted by eyewitness reports and the forensic examination. The actual cause was either a hit organized by Stalinists or the accidental discharge of a comrade's firearm.
Whatever the case,
Stalinists wasted no time in taking advantage of his death to force the "regularization" of the militias, meaning the disarmament of the working class, the ascendance of a standard, aristocratic, hierarchical military, and the end of the revolution.
Read 4 tweets
12 Oct 20
The Invention of Whiteness: the Spanish Laboratory
a thread

To mourn the first day of the Invasion, I'm sharing thoughts from a future book.
Much has been written on British colonization of Ireland as a laboratory for creating whiteness in the anglo world. Much less has been...
...written on the equally important Spanish experience, owing in part to anglocentric historiography and to a simplistic anti-imperialism only capable of focusing on the evils of Anglo-US dominance, and denying the centrality of whiteness to Iberian and Latin American societies.
In fact, Spain itself was invented as an integral part of this process of colonization and the creation of whiteness.
It's the year 1000. The concepts of Spain or a white race do not yet exist. Most of the Iberian peninsula is inhabited by a diverse Muslim society. The western...
Read 16 tweets

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