Interview from Segovia Prison with the Autonomous Groups

On the problem of armed struggle, the reactionary function of the CNT, & possible future developments of the anti-capitalist struggle.

By the comrades of the Spanish Federation of Anarchist Groups (F.I.G.A.)

Why not go back to the rich moments of the past four decades? The moments of violent class clash and rupture. How have the experiences of the mass insurrectional struggle in Turkey, Portugal, Spain, and Iran, among countless other places in the 1970s, been buried and ignored so completely? It’s in the spirit of unearthing these moments practically that we present this interview.

We obviously couldn’t give a fuck if some professional historian validates this or that revolution or further sanitizes and conceals their truths by presenting them in a textbook; we want to know how comrades have wrangled with these central questions: of organization, of the always-reformist Left and the fascist Right, of violent struggle and criminality, of how to relate to the wider class, and of solidarity.

Those imprisoned in Segovia obviously do not have the final answers to these questions; however, their responses reflect not only their own lives (made clear from the very first line), but the breadth of the autonomous struggle in Spain which had already been underway for more than a decade at the time of this interview in 1979. Their positions strike us as incredibly lucid- unsurprising given the constant necessity to untangle themselves from the Left (both democratic and armed) and various factions’ attempts to contain and manipulate the wildcat movement.

From this text, we hope to take several things: to clarify our understanding of history from outside the confines of the academy; to remind ourselves to take our comrades in prison seriously, both as combatants and as thinkers; and to always further articulate and substantiate our distance from the Left.