Was the F.A.I. a “centralised and secret” organisation that shunned “open debate and common struggle”?
They move onto Spanish Anarchism: “The anarchist organisation inside the Spanish C.N.T., the F.A.I., was centralised and secret. A revolutionary party thrives on open debate and common struggle with wider groups of workers.” We discuss this Marxist myth in more detail in section 3 of the appendix on “Marxists and Spanish Anarchism”. However a few points are worth making. The F.A.I., regardless of what the SWP assert, was not centralised. It was a federation of autonomous affinity groups. As one member put it: “It was never its aim to act as a leadership or anything of the sort — to begin with they had no slogans, nor was any line laid down, let alone any adherence to any hierarchical structure . . . This is what outside historians ought to grasp once and for all: that neither Durruti, nor Ascaso, nor Garcia Oliver — to name only the great C.N.T. spokesmen — issued any watchwords to the ‘masses,’ let alone delivered any operational plan or conspiratorial scheme to the bulk of the C.N
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