CNT Solidarity With Madison

The National Committee of Confederación Nacional de Trabajo CNT, Spain would like to take this opportunity to greet the American workers who have taken a stand against aggressions to their rights as laborers and especially to their right to organize. We believe the workers' struggle has to take place in their own midst, not dictated from above by their bosses, not from the upper hemispheres by their governmental “representatives” and not from their union “leaders”. As Madison is showing, the workers' can defend themselves just fine, all by themselves, are not lacking in solidarity and know how to react when attacked.

As anarchosyndicalists we believe in that the workers need to join and fight together, pick their own battles, decide how to fight those battles and, ultimately, control their own jobs and work-places. Our revolutionary aims – the overthrow of capitalism and its faithful servant the state and the establishment of anarchy – do not prevent us from standing with and behind any grass-roots workers' struggle, anywhere in the world as and when they arise and we would like to do so now, with the public servants of Wisconsin who have rightly rejected Governor Walker's poorly veiled assault on the rights they earned through more than a 100 years of battles in the streets and in the shops.

We hope that this battle succeeds in stopping the Governor's plans and that it rides the momentum to go one step further and ask for more, take more, take what is rightfully its own. To do that, you don't need leaders telling you what to do, not leaders in the big establishment unions, not leaders on the capitol. You just need each other, you need horizontal organization, mutual aid and self-management. The right to organize is the right to control over our own work and, fundamentally, the right to a free human society.

Buenventura Durruti said in 1936 that the workers weren't worried about “the ruins, because we're destined to inherit the earth and we carry a new world in our hearts...a world that is growing right now.”

All of our solidarity in your struggle to plant the seeds for that new world.