Redes Libertarias (06/06/2026)
Tomás Ibáñez’s essay, “Anarchism at the crossroads”, is an intervention in a debate in the Spanish anarchist milieu, but the controversy is neither uniquely Spanish nor novel.
What kind of organisation does anarchist politics call for? Must it have strategic or tactical goals, or both? How is it to be structured “internally”? What relationships should it have, if any, with other political organisations that share common ambitions, with people who have no organisational affiliation? Should the organisation in some way prefigure the “goals” of anarchism? Should such an organisation be bound to a particular “vision” of anarchism, should it heed to a binding ideology? Is a single anarchist organisation even desirable?
The questions, explicit and tacit, raised in the debate Ibáñez addresses are at the very heart of anarchism (and we could add, of the “socialist” tradition more broadly), and while he may not close it – he does not pretend to -, his intervention is important, perhaps even in ways that he has not expressed.
On this matter, we make our own the words of Herman Melville.
Oh, grassy glades! oh, ever vernal endless landscapes in the soul; in ye,—though long parched by the dead drought of the earthy life,—in ye, men yet may roll, like young horses in new morning clover; and for some few fleeting moments, feel the cool dew of the life immortal on them. Would to God these blessed calms would last. But the mingled, mingling threads of life are woven by warp and woof: calms crossed by storms, a storm for every calm. There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause:—through infancy’s unconscious spell, boyhood’s thoughtless faith, adolescence’ doubt (the common doom), then scepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood’s pondering repose of If. But once gone through, we trace the round again; and are infants, boys, and men, and Ifs eternally. Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more? In what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest will never weary? Where is the foundling’s father hidden? Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it.
Moby Dick, 1851
Or in a language closer to “the movement”:
There is no, nor can there be, a theoretical “magic wand” that solves all the problems of current practice. There are no “scripts” of the movement that offer certainty, nor has there ever been a “science of workers’ organisation,” despite the fact that some have tried to elevate themselves as its high priests. There are attempts, trials, experiments, situated analyses, and concrete hypotheses.
José Luis Carretero, Transversales, nº 64, 2023
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The 90th anniversary of the spanish revolution, today
Manel Aisa Pàmpols, Redes Libertarias, 20/07/2026
Trying to understand the anarchist movement in Barcelona, Catalonia, and the surrounding area in the early 20th century is by no means easy, but ultimately it is a phenomenon that is by no means new – it is a class struggle in the truest sense, which emerged, as in so many other parts of Europe and the Americas, with the development of the Industrial Revolution, when the bourgeoisie required a large workforce in the cities or in the industrial regions, and steam-powered machinery began to drive mass production; and so, faced with the need for a large workforce, the great migrations of the modern world began.
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