Book Review from Rebel Worker Paper of the Anarcho-Syndicalist Network
May-June 2026 Vol.44 No.1 (242)
Zaragoza Bound: A Chronicle of the Durruti Column
Roberto Martinez Catalan
AK Press
“On to Saragossa” was the rallying cry for the anarchist militia advance from Barcelona into Aragon at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. “Zaragoza Bound, a Chronicle of the Durruti Column,” is ostensibly an account of this. Except it’s not. Its focus is largely on key gaps in anarchist thinking as seen from outside and from inside the militia. Martinez Catalan sees these gaps as having had fatal consequences for the organization and conduct of the war, leading ultimately to the failure of the revolution. He suggests that any future attempt at a libertarian reorganization of society requires a rethinking of anarchist theory.
This book is organised around a study of the Durruti Column, an anarchist led militia formation that was formed in the first days after the defeat of the military rising in Barcelona. The Durruti Column immediately set out for Zaragoza/ Saragossa, the major city in the province of Aragoo. This city was a CNT stronghold, where the military uprising had been successful. Unlike rural Catalonia, anarchist and CNT (National Confederation of Labour, the anarcho-syndicalist trade union) influence was strong in rural Aragon. As the anarchist militias moved through villages on its march to Zaragoza, most villages set up collectives to share the land.
For Martinez Catalan at least two elements are essential to a politics that aims at a successful revolution. One is the question of the forms of military organization necessary to win a civil war, and the other is the question of the State. Both are questions of power. For Martinez Catalan the Spanish anarchists’ deep antipathy to militarism and the State left them floundering for ad hoc solutions to unavoidable and predictable problems.
The CNT was the largest union in Spain, and strongest in the “cinturon rojo y negro”, the belt of working class suburbs around Barcelona, where most workers were members of the anarcho-syndicalist trade union. According to George Orwell, it was as common there to be a member of the Anarchist Federation as to be a member of the Labour Party in Britain. The large scale takeover of Barcelona factories and enterprises under different forms of workers’ control isn’t dealt with in this book. The focus is on what Martinez Catalan sees as the key issues of Army and State, issues that he argues the anarchists were theoretically unequipped to deal with. Following the experience of the militias, there is discussion of the rural collectivization in Aragon.
How deep anti-militarism went in the anarchist and CNT rank and file cannot be underestimated, and this antipathy is central to the issues that Martinez Catalan identifies. Durruti, the leader of the Column, made regular broadcasts to the militia units. These were concerned overwhelmingly with the issue of functional discipline in an egalitarian and ant-authoritarian militia. There was no saluting or saying sir, and no privileges of rank. The militia was organized in groups of ten, and these were in turn organised into groups of a hundred. There were regular meetings by elected delegates from both levels. This largely followed CNT union practice. These delegates took part in higher level meetings with Durruti and an ex-army artillery sergeant who worked with Durruti as military advisor.
Simone Weil, serving with the Durruti Column’s International unit, summarizes a Durruti broadcast: “discipline, discipline, again discipline” The idea here was self-imposed (and group pressure imposed) regulation of behaviour. This meant following orders in combat, keeping discussion on organization and different approaches to the war for rest time and the regular delegates meetings. The anarchists opposed coercion, relying on argument and an egalitarian ethic of cooperation and sharing. The question was how far a military unit could be organized along these lines. Martinez Catalan argues that, while the Durruti Column was regarded by opponents as the most disciplined of the militias, there was an uneasy acceptance of what he sees as a “necessary” compromise that anarchist theory could not encompass. He points out that, while there was an absence of traditional military coercion, there was still coercion. Offenders dismissed from the Column were sent back, walking, to Barcelona.
Durruti felt that it was essential to work for the quickest victory, which meant the liberation of Zaragoza; if the war continued it would destroy the chance for a libertarian revolution as it hardened and brutalized those engaged in it. Speaking of relations between the militias and the peasants of Aragon, Simone Weil noted at the time “Without any insolence or brutality – or at any rate I saw none - … there was a gulf between the armed men and the unarmed populace, a gulf like the one between the poor and the rich. There was always something humble, submissive and fearful in the attitude of some and the swagger, lack of care and condescension coming from the others”.
Durruti opposed and tried to stop the killings of “fascists” (usually large owners) that often occurred when the Column reached a village, which was usually collectivised by acclamation after some discussion. This rural movement, partly conscious anarchist, partly the poorest sections in the village seeing value in the change to collectivization (with at least some feeling coerced), was then organized under the Council of Aragon. This consisted of Barcelona anarcho-syndicalist militia leaders, its purpose was to organize and control the rear guard. While often seized on as an example of revolutionary organization, it was largely what any regular army would have done. There doesn’t seem to have been any movement to bring the Council under the control of the collectives.
There were different levels of involvement in the collectives. Matinez Catalan reproduces (in his notes) diary entries made at the time by Simone Weil:
“Conversing with the peasants of Pina. Are you all agreed on farming together? First response (over several occasions); Whatever the committee says will be done. Old man: Yes provided that we are given everything we need and I am not all the time straining to pay off the carpenter, the doctor, the way I am now… Another said: We will have to see how everything works out… Would you rather farm together or divide things up? Yes (but none too categorically)… to the militians these impoverished and magnificent Aragonese peasants, bearing their degradation with such dignity, were not even items of curiosity.”
Franz Borkenau (The Spanish Cockpit) describes visiting a collective village where there were two cafes, one for the collectivists and one for the individualists (this was a negative anarchist term for small owners, not individualist anarchists). This was an ongoing situation that would continue developing, maybe going one way or the other, with the collectivists dominant, but might also have kept a large amount of tolerance for individual choices that did not involve the labour of others.
George Orwell, serving with the POUM (Workers Party of Marxist Unification) militia unit, aligned with the anarchists on the Aragon Front, recounts an incident that shows how deep the anti-authoritarian ethos ran in the CNT rank and file. This was the case even in those who had taken the POUM rather than the anarchists as their political direction. The bulk of the rank and file POUM militia members were from the CNT. For Orwell the POUM militia was as close to a fully egalitarian society as possible in wartime. Orwell noted that, despite egalitarianism, orders were supposed to be obeyed in the POUM militia. When he tried to drag a militiaman who refused to do guard duty to his post, Orwell was surrounded by militiamen calling him a fascist. When Mary Lowe and Juan Brea, attached to the international section of the POUM, described Durruti’s funeral, they pointed out that, while the Communists marched like automatons, and the anarchists were consciously all over the place, they felt that the POUM marched in a proper, democratic fashion. Because, they summed up, “We were all cenetistas”.
Marinez Catalan draws crucial lessons from the anarchist experience through examination of the decisions made and how they were made. He sees their failure as built into the theoretical perspectives of the anarchist militants, those who dedicated their lives, up to and after the civil war, to struggle for an egalitarian and libertarian socialism. He argues “...the lesson of the failed Spanish Revolution… might be summed up as the inescapable obligation to take political power and establish some sort of a democratic revolutionary government, complete with its corresponding specialist armed agencies – army or police, or howsoever one might prefer to label them – unless one was prepared to doom the revolution to defeat in advance; in the early stages at any rate.”
The “in the early stages at any rate” contains the problem. What form of revolutionary government will deny itself continuing power? One that could is the Workers Councils system, dismissed by Martinez Catalan. Taken as the body holding the sole right to determine the use of force, in this meeting Weber’s core definition of the state, it is still the form of organization that can be brought under the most direct control of the rank and file. It can coordinate rather than order, depending on the extent to which it stays, or progresses, under rank and file based control.
Martinez Catalan argues for the necessity of a clear anarchist recognition of the need for some form of State (regardless of what it may be called). The book includes a critical discussion of the Friends of Durruti group (who were not actually friends of Durruti), which called for a revolutionary junta and a new revolution during the 1937 May Days fighting in Barcelona. Unfortunately there is nothing on the Italian volunteer Camillo Berneri’s advocacy for Workers’ Councils, which he carried on in the militias though his paper Guerra di Classe until his murder. Just before the May Days he was shot (either by Stalinist or Italian Fascist agents) after making a radio broadcast on the death of Antonio Gramsci.
Martinez Catalan is dismissive of the idea of an anarcho-syndicalist organization as an alternative to the State. He emphasizes Durruti’s position that the CNT would liberate Zaragoza, even refusing POUM support in an assault on Zaragosa, arguing that the CNT was sufficient in itself to free Zaragoza and proclaim Libertarian Communism.
Both Durruti and Garcia Oliver, two of the foremost militants of the FAI (the Iberian Anarchist Federation) always speak of revolution as the CNT taking over as the form of transition to libertarian communism. However, for them this had to be a CNT with their views of how the revolution could be made. The period from the FAI’s formation in 1929 to the military uprising in 1936 was a period of seeking and establishing FAI dominance within the CNT.
The history of FAI dominance of CNT conferences, of the expulsion of the BOC (later to form the POUM) and the Trientistas from the CNT, is what is missing here. The Trientistas, lifelong anarcho-syndicalists, were opposed to the FAI’s insurrectionary tactics. They argued for building the CNT as a mass organization aimed at a libertarian revolution. Expelled from the CNT together with the local union sections that supported them, they asked what was the goal of the trade union? They declared revolution, and so were revolutionary syndicalists. But then asking themselves what kind of revolution, they declared a libertarian revolution. They called their organization the Libertarian Syndicalist Federation, and worked to reunite the CNT and develop internal democracy. The history of the rise of FAI substitutionism is as much an issue as what was done with it.
Lenin, arguing with Bukharin on trade union autonomy, said “Everything from below is the anarchist way. But doesn’t comrade Bukharin see that if the workers could vote on everything they might vote to do away with socialism?” This is indeed the core position which distinguishes anarchism from other approaches. Some of the problems Martinez Catalan examines come from too much rather than too little departure from this.
Zaragoza Bound is a book with a lot of worthwhile information and challenging arguments. It’s a book where the notes are an essential part of the book, containing more nuanced forms of the main arguments and extensive and valuable passages from many first hand accounts.
However, for these very reasons, this isn’t the best first book to read on the Spanish Revolution. George Orwell’s ‘Homage to Catalonia” gives a better feel for the situation where, according to Orwell, the working class was in the saddle, and why that mattered. The Trotskyist Felix Morrow’s “Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Spain”, written at the time, gives a fair, critical account of what happened. Ronald Fraser’s oral history “The Blood of Spain” and Chris Ealham’s “Class, Culture and Conflict in Barcelona 1898-1937” give modern academic accounts that capture the lived experience of the war and revolution.
Despite these reservations, this is a valuable book, especially for anarchists. Its argument against anarchist views (which he often dismisses as anarchist dreams) of alternatives to the State, can lead to difficult conclusions. The flaw in the argument however is that it makes the differences between forms of overall social power appear irrelevant in the face of the need for a State. For Martinez Catalan there is no alternative. Yet the radical democracy of the Workers’ Council system is such an alternative. One consistent with enabling the development of libertarian and democratic goals. One that can fail, but also one that can succeed.
xxxxxx
Comments
Hello Rebel Worker Paper: I…
Hello Rebel Worker Paper:
I read with interest the review you published of my book: "Zaragoza Bound: A Chronicle of the Durruti Column". I would like to clarify a few points that have been misunderstood; perhaps because I wasn’t clear enough.
First of all, far from dismissing the system of Workers Councils, I argue precisely the opposite: that it would have been the best solution to the revolutionary situation that arose in July 1936.
As I explain, at the plenary session of the Catalan CNT on July 21, the path forward was debated in light of the scenario of war and revolution unfolding before them, with the discussion polarizing into two positions: 1) Postpone the revolution and collaborate with the other anti-fascist forces to defeat the military uprising, a proposal that prevailed; 2) Dissolve the Generalitat and proclaim Libertarian Communism; “going for broke” is what García Oliver called it, a euphemism he used instead of “taking power.”
On page 38, I recount how García Oliver, according to his memoirs, proposed at that plenary session “what started (…)” and “events being forced in such a way that (…) the anarcho-syndicalist unions ‘go for broke’, meaning organize libertarian communist life throughout Spain”. A proposal, I went on to explain, that: “Given that the CNT did not account for the majority of the working class, never mind the overall population, some rightly labeled this proposal as an ‘anarchist dictatorship’”. And here’s the key passage: “The most striking thing about the matter is that it seems that all of the participants there were pondering a hypothetical proclamation of libertarian communism and furthering the revolution along those or very similar lines, and the understanding was that the CNT as an organization should ‘prevail after the revolution’. Neither at that point nor, more significantly, in any subsequent debate surrounding this topic, was there any discussion of turning the main committees that had mushroomed right across the country -once they had been democratized and coordinated until the constituted a central authority- into the governing agencies of a future revolutionary regime. A formula a lot more coherent than the establishment of some sort of a trade union dictatorship or collaboration with other antifascist factions regardless of ideology, something that might have attracted the support of other revolutionary factions, as well as of workers of no particular political persuasions. Instead, they thought of those revolutionary committees as just temporary bodies doomed sooner of later to fade away, and there was no doubt about this because they were extraneous to their organizational models”. These democratized committees would, in fact, have constituted Workers Councils (or free Soviets). At least that is how I see it.
Second, as I note in the highlighted passage, in my opinion these committees should have been coordinated to the point of establishing a central authority; primarily to coordinate the economy and the armed struggle. However, this central authority—whether called a Council, Committee, Junta or Government (as I do at the end of the book, knowing full well that it is highly controversial)—should not have been guided by the same logic as a traditional government, but rather by a revolutionary one: control from the grassroots, rotation of positions, equal pay as any other worker…
Does this mean I advocate for the necessity of the state? It depends on what is meant by state, for it is a rather slippery concept, open to interpretation. If by state we mean the existence of some kind of central power or authority, regardless of its characteristics, then yes, that can indeed be said. But if by state we mean a bureaucratic structure separate from society, which tends to perpetuate itself in power and whose main objective is the defense of the interests of certain ruling classes; in that case, no. And I want to emphasize in this regard that in my book I speak of a revolutionary government, and in no case of a revolutionary state.
Finally, one of the key issues I wish to raise is not that of the state, but that of power; the need to establish a workers’ power that fills the vacuum left by the collapse of the state and is capable of meeting the challenges posed by the onset of the Revolution. The seizure of power I advocate is not in the sense of any particular party, union, organization or leadership group; but in the sense of the class. The working class as a whole must seize and exercise power through its own agencies.
The Revolution, the emancipation of the workers, as enshrined in the statutes of the First International, must be the work of the workers themselves.
Best regards.
Roberto Martínez Catalán.
Real History and imaginary…
Real History and imaginary councils. On the review of Zaragoza Bound
xxxxxx’s review of Zaragoza Bound is surprising for one fundamental reason: it seeks to discuss one of the key issues of the Spanish Revolution — the question of revolutionary power — whilst deliberately ignoring the very bodies through which that power was effectively exercised by the Catalan proletariat between July 1936 and May 1937.
This is not a minor omission. It constitutes a historiographical shortcoming that undermines the whole of his argument.
The July 1936 revolution did not produce soviets similar to those in Russia, nor workers’ councils comparable to those in Germany in 1918–1919. It produced something different: an extensive network of revolutionary neighbourhood committees, local committees, defence committees, factory committees, supply committees, control patrols and bodies for economic and military coordination, which emerged from the defeat of the military insurrection and took on functions that had until then belonged to the state apparatus. It was these bodies that ensured supplies, organised production, enforced revolutionary order, coordinated the repression of the counter-revolution and enabled the expropriation of factories, workshops and public services. This is the fundamental historical fact of the catalan revolution.
However, the reviewer pays them scant attention. He prefers to shift the debate towards an abstract discussion of workers’ councils, the soviets and various revolutionary experiences unrelated to the Spanish reality. The councils are repeatedly presented as an alternative to the State, as a superior form of proletarian democracy and as a response to the theses defended by Roberto Martínez Catalán. But the more he insists on these abstract models, the less he speaks of the revolutionary organisations that actually exist.
The consequence is clear. Where the reader — or the historian — ought to start from the specific forms taken by the revolution in order to understand its nature and its contradictions, the review replaces the facts with abstract categories. Where it would be necessary to examine the functioning of the revolutionary committees, their relationship with the trade unions, the mechanisms that coordinated their activities and the causes of their subsequent dismantling, the review chooses instead to take refuge in analogies drawn from other historical experiences. In this way, concrete history is overshadowed by the weight of doctrinal speculation.
And yet, the central problem of the Spanish Revolution was never the choice between the State and the workers’ councils. The real historical problem was the conflictual coexistence of two antagonistic powers. On the one hand, the revolutionary bodies that had emerged from the proletarian insurrection of July. On the other, the Republican state apparatus that the Generalitat and the central government gradually rebuilt until they regained the monopoly on administration, coercion and the armed forces.
The crucial question was not whether there should be power. Revolutionary power already existed. It was exercised by the neighbourhood committees, the defence committees, the local committees, the trade unions and the workers’ organisations that had defeated the rebellious army on the streets of Barcelona. The question was how to coordinate that power, how to consolidate it and how to prevent it from being absorbed by state institutions whose reconstruction was facilitated by the very collaborationist policy of the CNT’s higher committees.
It is significant that the review, which is specifically devoted to discussing the issue of revolutionary power, overlooks this fundamental question. Even more significant is its treatment of the Friends of Durruti, whose historical importance it seems to fail to grasp.
The Friends of Durruti did not emerge as the result of an academic debate on the State, nor as a doctrinal elaboration intended to correct certain theoretical shortcomings of anarchism. They arose from a specific and traumatic revolutionary experience: the militarisation of the confederal militias and the gradual subordination of the revolution to the needs of the Republican State.
A substantial proportion of its members came from the Durruti Column. They had fought on the Aragon front and had experienced first-hand the process of militarisation imposed on the revolutionary militias. They believed that the transformation of the confederal columns into units of the regular army meant much more than a mere organisational reform. It signified the dismantling of one of the key achievements of July 1936 and the subordination of the revolution to the objectives of the Republican State.
That is why they rejected militarisation. Eight hundred militiamen from the Fourth Gelsa Group of the Durruti Column abandoned the front and returned to Barcelona with their weapons. They were revolutionary deserters who were breaking with the confederal leadership’s policy, convinced that the revolution was being sacrificed for the sake of the war. In Barcelona, together with other anarchists opposed to the CNT’s collaboration with the Generalitat government, they founded an organisation dedicated to defending the continuation of the revolutionary process: The Friends of Durruti.
This fact is crucial to understanding the origins and nature of the group. The Friends of Durruti were not intellectuals who reflected on power from a distance. They were revolutionaries who drew political conclusions from their experience of combat. Barely two months after formally establishing themselves as a group, those same militants found themselves once again on the front line, erecting barricades and fighting during the May Days of 1937 against the counter-revolutionary offensive led by Stalinists, Republicans and the forces of law and order. Their programme was born out of that experience.
And that is precisely why it is impossible to understand their proposal for a Revolutionary Junta if it is interpreted as a mere libertarian variant of the State. The Revolutionary Junta did not seek to create a new state structure separate from the proletariat. It sought to coordinate and centralise the revolutionary power already existing within the revolutionary committees, the defence committees and the workers’ organisations that had emerged from the revolution itself. Its legitimacy was to derive from these bodies and not from a specialised bureaucracy or an apparatus separate from the working class.
Here we see another of the review’s fundamental weaknesses: its constant confusion between power and the State.
Every State exercises power. But not every form of power constitutes a State.
The revolutionary committees exercised power. The collectives exercised power. The control patrols exercised power. The defence committees exercised power. The Revolutionary Junta proposed by the Friends of Durruti would have exercised power. The historical question lies precisely in analysing the nature of that power, its forms of organisation, its mechanisms of control and its relationship with the working class.
Reducing all these experiences to an undifferentiated form of the State does not resolve any theoretical problem. It simply eliminates it by means of an arbitrary definition. It is a conceptual simplification that prevents us from understanding both the Spanish Revolution and the most original political contributions that emerged from it.
The same analytical poverty is evident in the repeated reliance on authors such as George Orwell, Simone Weil and Franz Borkenau. No one disputes the testimonial value of their writings. They constitute useful sources and, at times, are extraordinarily thought-provoking. But it is difficult to accept that in 2026 they are still being used as the primary interpretative authorities whilst an extensive body of historiography produced over recent decades – drawn from trade union archives, administrative documentation, the labour press, court records and unpublished sources – is ignored.
Orwell spent a few months observing a POUM column. Weil stayed in Aragon for a few weeks. Borkenau was an occasional observer. None of them studied the revolutionary committees in Barcelona. None had access to the documentation currently available. None were able to reconstruct the complex dynamics of the revolutionary bodies that emerged in July 1936. Their value is anecdotal and literary. To make them the main basis for a historical interpretation reveals an excessive reliance on old Anglo-Saxon narratives and a worrying lack of awareness of subsequent research.
But the underlying problem is not a bibliographical one. It is a methodological one.
History is not about selecting examples that confirm a pre-existing hypothesis, nor is it about substituting ideal models for the facts. Nor is it about projecting our contemporary political preferences onto the past. The historian’s task is to take actual reality as their starting point, reconstruct specific processes, identify their contradictions and explain their transformations.
The catalan revolution did take place. The revolutionary committees did exist. The defence committees did exist. The collectives did exist. The Friends of Durruti did exist. All of these are documented and verifiable historical realities. It is these facts that must underpin our theories, and not our theories that should take the place of the facts.
That is why the central question remains the same as that posed by the revolution itself: what were the organs of proletarian power that emerged in July 1936, how did they function, and why were they defeated? As long as that question remains unanswered, any discussion of workers’ councils, State or revolutionary power will continue to remain in the realm of abstraction.
The story begins precisely where abstractions end and facts begin. And the facts, in this case, are stubborn.
Conclusion: Roberto Martínez Catalán’s book deserved a better reviewer.
Agustín Guillamón
Barcelona, junio de 2026
Agustín Guillamón’s answers…
Agustín Guillamón’s answers to a comrade’s questions on revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The proletarian revolution can only exist as the destruction of the State, and any form of power separate from the working class ultimately becomes a counter-revolution.
1. Generally speaking, I do not consider it appropriate to speak of complementarity between the dictatorship of the proletariat and social revolution. Historically, the notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat has functioned as an ambiguous formula which, far from reinforcing the social revolution, has justified the reconstruction of the State in supposedly transitional forms. The social revolution implies the immediate abolition of capitalist and state social relations; the dictatorship of the proletariat, by contrast, refers to a centralised political power that tends to place itself above the class.
2. As regards the definitions you use, the definition of ‘social revolution’ is appropriate, in that it emphasises self-organisation and the simultaneous abolition of the State and capital. The definition of the dictatorship of the proletariat, however, reproduces an ambiguity present in certain formulations by Marx: speaking of the ‘conquest of political power’ and of a ‘transition’ opens the door to a state-centred conception of the revolutionary process which history has tragically disproved. The experience of the Russian Revolution shows how the identification of proletarian power with the power of a party and a state apparatus ultimately led to Stalinism.
3. Your conceptualisation of the foundation of revolutionary power is correct in identifying the crux of the disagreement. For Bakunin, power is neither political nor representative, but social, collective and immanent to proletarian self-organisation. In Marx, at least in some of his more problematic arguments, power tends to crystallise as class rule, that is, as a separate political form. This is not merely a matter of two different strategies, but of two antagonistic logics of power.
4. I do not agree with the idea of an analytical complementarity between Marx and Bakunin in their interpretation of the Commune. It is precisely the Commune that demonstrates the limitations of any interpretation that seeks to reconcile social self-organisation with political power. Its defeat did not stem from a lack of state power, but from the fact that it had neither completely destroyed the State nor extended the revolution. To speak of strategic complementarity between social revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat strikes me as even more problematic: historical experience shows that the latter ends up eliminating the former. I recommend you read my book on the Russian Revolution.
5. In the revolutionary process of 1936, we can clearly speak of a social revolution, but not of a dictatorship of the proletariat. What did exist was genuine workers’ power, exercised through committees, collectivisation and militias, which was progressively dismantled in the name of anti-fascism, political unity and the reconstruction of the republican state.
6. There are clear parallels between the Paris Commune and 1936: the emergence of organs of proletarian power, the inability or refusal to destroy the State, international isolation and, ultimately, defeat. In both cases, the counter-revolution came not only from outside, but also from within the politically organised working-class movement itself.
7. My critique of state anarchism is neither moral nor ideological, but historical. Anarcho-syndicalism exercised immense power, yet refused to recognise it as such. It declined to formulate a theory of power because it identified power exclusively with the state. This constitutes a genuine theoretical void: without a theory of revolutionary social power, existing power ends up being ceded to the class enemies.
8. If anarchism is to revitalise itself, it must abandon dogmatism and complacency. Its tasks involve a radical critique of the State, of mainstream trade unions, of parliamentarism and of all forms of political mediation. But, above all, it must re-root itself in the real experience of the working class, develop a rigorous theory of proletarian power and recognise that revolution is not an abstract ideal, but a concrete historical process, involving mistakes, defeats and lessons.
9. On the other hand, revolutionary anarchism — represented during the Civil War by the Friends of Durruti, the neighbourhood committees, the defence committees, the factory committees, certain trade unions for brief periods, and various anarchist groups — must make a clear and definitive break with state anarchism, that is, with those sectors that participated in the Republican governments and embraced the need for state reconstruction. During the Civil War, these sectors ran the Organisation in Catalonia in a top-down, hierarchical manner from a ‘Committee of Committees’ which bore more than a few functional similarities to the central committee of a Leninist party. Taking stock of this experience remains a fundamental necessity; this was, precisely, the task of *Balance*, the journal I edited for many years.
10. It is important to understand the concept of the Revolutionary Junta developed by the Friends of Durruti from March 1937 onwards and set out in greater detail in the pamphlet *Towards a New Revolution* (1938). This proposal arose from the realisation of the failure of the confederal leadership and the gradual defeat of the revolutionary organisations that had emerged in July 1936.
The Revolutionary Junta was conceived not as a new state apparatus separate from the working class, but as the body responsible for coordinating, unifying and driving forward the revolutionary power already being exercised by the workers’ committees, the trade unions, the militias and the other organisations that had emerged from the revolution. Its role was not to replace these organs of revolutionary power, but to centralise action in order to deepen the social transformation underway: the expropriation of factories and businesses, the organisation of a new public order under workers’ and popular control, and the mobilisation of the militias on the war front against fascism. In short, it was to be the instrument for consolidating, extending and providing a common direction to the new social relations and forms of power born of the revolution.
The Friends of Durruti sought to address the fundamental problem that Spanish anarchism had failed to resolve: how to defend and deepen the revolution without rebuilding the State and without ceding power to political parties and republican institutions. The Revolutionary Junta was not conceived as a party dictatorship or as a traditional government, but as the organised expression of proletarian power exercised directly by the class’s revolutionary organisations. In this sense, it represents one of the most important theoretical endeavours of revolutionary anarchism to overcome the limitations demonstrated by the CNT-FAI during the Civil War.
For this reason, the debate on the Revolutionary Council remains today an indispensable point of reference for reflecting on the problems of revolutionary organisation, proletarian power, the coordination of grassroots organisations, and the defence of the revolution against the counter-revolution. Without a clear answer to these questions, any revolutionary process runs the risk of repeating the defeats of the past.
Best regards from Agustín Guillamón, June 2026.