Anarchists in the CNT Congress

"There's even bald people in the CNT." [Picture note in the original text]

From A las barricadas by Acratosaurio rex, English translation by Anarchist News

The XII Congress of the CNT has ended. Even though I went as an invited guest, and trying to assist to the meetings, I was immediately incapacitated by the organizational verbiage… Accreditation, recasting, presentation, title, contestation, revision, accreditation commission, stamp of approval… I began to tremble. It’s like when a vampire smells garlic, or when a cross is shown to them: they shriek and flee away. Fortunately –due to my advanced age–, a group of half-naked young people (shirtless or with tops, my disciples), delicately took me by the hands and armpits and deposited me, drooling and with disoriented eyes, in a bar near the Al Mohajirin mosque, from where I’ve not moved, and could not be pried away with a crowbar. You say that I could have just assisted to the cultural activities instead? The same thing happens to me. It’s like when a vampire gets hit by sunlight. I hear the word «culture» and I carbonize and disintegrate letting out howls of indescribable pain. So I’ll tell you how I’ve survived the Congress Number XII: from a bar.

The first thing that comes to mind, is to mention the constructive role of anarchists in the CNT. Because, yes: anarchism is present, in the following manner. If people that claim to be “of the Idea” come together without a concrete task and work to be done (if it’s a magazine or a blog, if there’s not some actual work to promote, it’s worth very little) in the end, it becomes mere group therapy. I think anarchists, before resorting to gathering for the sake of gathering, which is like an ethnic and very prehistoric thing (searching for anarchists just because they’re anarchists), should make an analysis of their local reality, look for a concrete objective (susceptible to broadening and modifying), and based on that, look for people with common interests to launch the attack.

There are various anarchisms out there. Even an atrocious anarchism, that looks for conflict in the tone with which the word «festival» or «bookfair» is mentioned in a specific text. Do such words have a reformist content? What do those who promote fairs intend? The destruction of anarchism perhaps? Is so-and-so and agent of the State? That anarchism, honestly, I don’t even want to see it in an abstract painting, and it simply dies if it’s ignored.

I think today we can consider that there’s also a laid-back anarchism that rests on its laurels, which is fueled by nostalgia, has no militant reflex, nor real representation, nor social impact, and good if it has have any, but little else. They’re anarchists that gather among, we can say, “well formed” anarchists.

And then there’s the active anarchists. The importance of those that called themselves active anarchists in the year 1900 is that their members, in addition to the naturism, the paellas, the mountaineering, the choirs and Esperanto; in addition to the expropriations, the stakeouts and surprise attacks; they were there to push forward labor conflicts, to bring about the first rent strikes in Barcelona or Tenerife, to reduce the work day and push forward the dignity of the Working Class. In 1868 an anarchist gathering was one among typographers, engravers, doctors, trying to approach the proletariat of the factories and the farms, to organize it. In 1930 an anarchist gathering was one among that same working class element, waiters, needlewomen, mechanics, organizing themselves and trying to make their own revolution. An anarchist gathering in 2020 can’t be a meet-up of "alternative" people, university students, college professors, functionaries, trying to meet-up among themselves to do things that only interests their own kind. A gathering in which active syndicalist anarchists participate, is a meeting among metalworkers, janitors, shop assistants, managers, construction workers, professors and many others trades, studying how to approach this dodgy situation we’re living in.

This is the paradigm of the CNT. This organization has a plan, a roadmap, a destination. The anarchists of the CNT don’t gather among anarchists. They gather among militant syndicates, contributing ideas, sharing objectives, proposing solutions and facing the real problems of our current world.

I’ll get around to tell you all about their agreements, if they tell me about them. What I can say about my impression, is that upon ending the Congress, the delegates I met up with (after saying goodbye to the clerics of the mosque and the parish of the bar) were crying because the gathering had ended. Amazing. They were moved. With their confrontations, with their fights, with their boredom, the delegates had lived a liminal experience, a total experience, that they enjoyed as comrades, catching a glimpse of the possibility of that new word that we desire. That’s why they left –at least those I met– proud to belong to a great labor organization, willing go across the bourgeois desert, leaving behind, not a path of destruction, of debris and twisted steel. In their wake they will leave behind a well-tended vegetable patch.

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