Organising-federating anarchists in Seville. From El Topo, Nº 71, May 2026
On February 12, 2026, at CSOA La Yesca, we presented ourselves as the Seville Anarchist Assembly. After more than two years of internal work, the time had come for us to open up and expand our forces to build anarchy in Seville and beyond.
Our assembly was born from the need to unite, overcome the dispersion of the Sevillian anarchist movement in recent years, and create a solid libertarian project that allows us to seriously believe again in that new world we dream of. When we first met in December 2023, many of us had gone through a period of frustration with social struggles reduced to citizen mobilisations and assemblies as ends in themselves. Some of us had become worn down by the effort of pulling the cart along with just a few, while also balancing activism with the need to pay the rent. Who hasn’t felt tired of capital and of not having time to end it?
Analysing the political context, we concluded that the demobilisation we intended to leave behind was a result not only of the impact of years of repression against the anarchist movement, but also of an evolution shared by social movements of all kinds, which, in a very summarised way, could be described as follows:
2008-2011: The bubble bursts, and the deceptive promise of infinite growth becomes evident. People lose their homes, become unemployed, and can no longer make ends meet. Mobilisations and struggles arise everywhere, with constant attempts to fight against authority.
2011: From the mud of some and the efforts of others, the 15M movement was born. It fills the squares with assemblies, horizontality, and self-organisation. The explosion spreads through the neighborhoods.
2014-present: Podemos [party] emerges. It instrumentalises the mobilisation, draining it into an institutional channel. Opportunism and reinforcement of social democracy under new acronyms. Neo-reformism spreads, and disillusionment, disorganisation, and apathy grow.
2020: The pandemic highlights capitalist priorities: production over health. Amidst class-based confinement, fear is used to justify increased surveillance and repression.
2019-present: Acceptance of authoritarianism has accumulated: teenagers demanding Franco, exacerbated racism, authoritarian leaders emerging in neighborhoods. Either we organise, or we will be run over.
Yes, we need to organise, to stop feeling alone in the face of the harshness of what is to come. Undoubtedly, the rise of fascism, increasingly blatant racism, and the escalation of belligerence are among the main threats pushing us to take action as soon as possible. With the same urgency, we feel the need to combat police violence and repression, in which the State—even the social-democratic one—shows its ugliest face. Of course, we cannot ignore the fight for housing, nor the struggle to end the extractivism that reduces our planet to raw materials.
We know that we share these concerns with many other libertarian collectives around the world, although the ways of addressing them are multiple and have given rise to arduous discussions about organisational models and forms of action. We consciously decided not to affiliate ourselves with any particular current, but rather to get to know them all and learn from each what convinces us most in our current context. We would love for our assembly to become an impetus for a diverse anarchist ecosystem, in which all libertarian collectives and individuals in Seville find their place, complementing each other.
At the same time, we see it as essential to base our collective work on common ideas. Therefore, we dedicated a large part of our first two years to internal debate to equip ourselves with principles, tactics, and goals resulting from profound thought. We start from a rejection of all authority, hierarchy, and systems of oppression: the State, capitalism, religious institutions, patriarchy, and colonialism. In contrast, we will always defend freedom, equality, solidarity, and mutual support. We will do this by practicing horizontality in our daily lives, leaving reformism behind and promoting direct action. We believe in the need to intensify the conflict against power structures. We neither buy nor want their promises of social peace in exchange for submission.
We intend to build a strong militant culture, aspiring to live our anarchist ideas in every facet of life. We understand that this implies collectivising daily life and, in the long term, transforming the Anarchist Assembly into a network of mutual support, backed by self-management structures that allow us to sustain each other, depending less and less on institutional or capitalist patchwork solutions. At the same time, we feel the responsibility to engage in local social struggles. We are committed to coordinating anarchists both in our city and in the rest of the territory. In all our steps, we will always be driven by a passion for anarchy, that free and supportive society that, however distant it may seem to us today, we continue to glimpse on the horizon.
We were overjoyed by the large number of people who attended our presentation, some driven by the curiosity to approach anarchism for the first time, others seeking a space to rekindle their enthusiasm. Our welcoming committee remains open to receive those who wish to begin walking with us.
If the current world fills you with anger and anguish, if you are seeking a strong community to confront it, if you share our love for anarchy… Don’t stay home alone. Light the flame!
Illustration by Helena García