The iberian anarchist revolution ninety years ago: a unique and unrepeatable ex-perience?

Abstract

Why hasn't a powerful anarchist movement been reborn in Catalonia and Spain in the transition from the so-called "welfare society" to neoliberalism? For a moment, it seemed that things could go differently. In the territories of the Catalan language and in post-Francoist Spain, but even francoist, the libertarian spring of the seventies was frustrated. There was no objective possibility of splicing with what the anarcho-syndicalist mass movement of the first decades of the century had been. This article by Pere Solà focuses on several of the factors of the eclipse of the libertarian perspective in the Spanish state since the seventies. Such an eclipse is at odds with an international tendency to consider that anarchy, the way of thinking and living that proclaims individual freedom and collective equality, arouses a renewed interest in the cultural, political, philosophical, and educational sphere. The question of power and violence from the democratic perspective has returned to the foreground, echoing classical reflections such as those of Noam Chomsky and other contemporary ones such as those of the philosophers Cathérine Malabou or Giorgio Agamben.