A-Infos (en) Spaine, Regeneracion: Strategy and organization in the history of Galician anarchism (1975-2025) (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Continuation of the article that covered the Strategy and Organization 
of Galician anarchism, between 1871 and 1936, also published on this 
portal. By XESTA ORGANIZACIÓN ANARQUISTA GALEGA ---- The enormous 
repression exerted on anarchist organizations and militants during the 
Franco dictatorship, together with the organic decomposition suffered by 
the CNT during this period of clandestine activity, facilitated the 
hegemonization of the working class by the Marxist parties. The 
anarcho-syndicalists remained faithful to their principles, rejecting 
possibilist strategies, such as that of the Communist Party of Spain 
(PCE) of participating in the syndicalist structures of the Regime, with 
the intention of eroding it from within. Furthermore, internal quarrels 
between different currents prevented the anarchist ranks from organizing 
a unitary action to fight against the Regime. Four decades of repression 
and resistance, and the lack of a unified strategic plan led the CNT to 
a progressive distancing from the working masses.

The decomposition of the Franco regime once the dictator died, and the 
legalization of unions and political parties, meant a resurgence of the 
libertarian movement in the late 1970s. A resurgence that had its 
foundations in the context of the anti-Franco struggle in which groups 
such as Vangardas Ácratas Galegas or Colectivo Denuncia had emerged. 
Along with the refoundation of the Galician CNT in March 1977, a large 
number of anarchist groups sprang up across the country. But this 
happened in a very different context to the pre-war one, in which the 
capitalist system had made its exploitation model more complex, 
generating new relations of production, new jobs and also new 
subjectivities. Subjectivities by virtue of which the citizen and the 
consumer came to occupy symbolic spaces previously covered by the 
working class. A systemic reconversion that caused labor struggles, and 
with them unionism, to lose weight in the revolutionary movement, 
reducing the social bases of the unions by leaps and bounds, while many 
of their potential militants began to join the ranks of neighborhood, 
environmental, or cultural organizations, among many others.

According to this new context, new libertarian collectives were being 
founded throughout the Iberian Peninsula that were bringing new 
strategic visions to Iberian anarchism. In the words of Mikel "Tar" 
Orrantía, one of the founders of the Basque libertarian collective 
Askatasuna, what was at stake then was to achieve "overcoming the 
limitations of organization in a single field, be it labor, citizen, or 
any other that does not attack all aspects of the alternative 
revolutionary struggle head-on from a single anti-capitalist 
organization"1. Askatasuna brought to the forefront of the libertarian 
debate the need to carry out a "global" struggle against all the 
dynamics of capital exploitation, and not only against those that occur 
in the labor field, in addition to the need for the unity of the various 
revolutionary currents in this struggle, following the spirit of the 
First International. But, in addition to this, Askatasuna reopened two 
old debates in Iberian anarchism. On the one hand, what has to do with 
the organizational question, advocating for a dual scheme, in which on 
the one hand there would be class organizations, made up of all the 
workers and citizens of a specific area, and on the other the autonomous 
assembly movement, made up of groups, organizations and revolutionary 
militants who had committed to horizontal models of organization. This 
commitment to dualism was not an ex novo conception, but a classic 
organizational model of anarchism, already formulated by Bakunin in 1868 
for his Alliance, and which had had various lines of continuity in 
Europe and America. On the other hand, Askatasuna reopened the debate on 
the national question within the libertarian movement, advocating for 
the independence of the Basque Country and becoming one of the first 
anarcho-independence groups in the Iberian Peninsula.

Among the groups founded in Galicia that claimed to be part of the 
anarchist milieu during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, several, following 
the lines of Askatasuna, assumed the centrality of the national question 
through previous Marxist militancy. This was the case of the Vangardas 
Ácratas Galegas (1967/68), the Grupo Anarquista Campesiño (1976/77) and 
the libertarian groups Arco da Vella (1980/82) and Zona Aberta 
(1981/82), which were pillars of the Anarcho-Communist Galician 
Federation as early as the early 1980s. However, none of these groups 
seem to have developed a theoretical-strategic line or a program of 
intervention in Galician society, as the Basque anarchists had done. On 
the one hand, Arco da Vella, after its foundation in 1979 as an 
anarcho-communist organization, seems to have exhausted all its efforts 
in the following years in the publication of a magazine of the same name 
which, lacking a specific political line, functioned more as a continent 
of Galician libertarian culture than as a political organization. 
However, the libertarian collective Zona Aberta, founded in 1981, did 
develop its own political discourse, focused on the need for a "social 
practice" to overcome the division between Marxists and anarchists. 
Perhaps the most similar to a strategic positioning on the part of these 
groups was the manifesto published in 1976 in which the Grupo Anarquista 
Campesiño advocated the participation of its militants in two levels of 
struggle in the country, one economic, joining the remnants of vertical 
peasant unionism, in order to found a Galician peasant union with an 
anarcho-syndicalist orientation, and another cultural, with the 
formation of clubs and societies that would defend the Galician language 
and culture. However, it is not known whether these proposals, developed 
in the nationalist press of the time, had gone beyond the scope of 
discourse and ended up transforming into a strategy, let alone a program 
of intervention on Galician social reality.

Photo by Anna Turbau. Ortigueira, 1978 (Can be seen at the Museo Reina 
Sofía in Madrid)

This was happening in a context of consolidation of the political 
transition to the Regime of 1978, in which the Moncloa Pacts and the 
Scala Case clipped the wings of a libertarian movement in upward 
dynamics. In Galicia, the cycle of social struggles and for the defense 
of the land that had reached its peak in 1977 - with conflicts such as 
the AP-9, As Encrobas, the Xove nuclear power plant or the Baldaio 
sandbank - was coming to an end. The Marxist parties (namely the Unión 
do Povo Galego and the Partido Socialista Galego) that had acted in 
these fronts of struggle in an organized manner, took advantage of these 
conflicts to increase their social base and to structure their 
organizations in the territory. An intervention that would unfortunately 
lead what came to be called the Galician national-popular movement to 
run aground in the electoral-institutional field.

A strategy of the anarchist organizations to participate in these fronts 
of struggle in an organized manner, and not as individuals, could 
perhaps have prevented all that social force from being channeled by the 
Marxist parties towards reformist objectives. But it is also the case 
that this lack of strategy would have left the young Galician anarchist 
organizations of the time at the mercy of the initiative of the parties, 
which would end up even setting their political agenda for them. Thus, 
both Arco da Vella and Zona Aberta would participate in 1982 in the 
process of establishing a unitary organization of Galician nationalism 
which, although initially formulated by some of its promoter groups as 
"a broad anti-authoritarian platform in which sovereignty should rest 
with the collectives", ended up being founded as a "unitary patriotic 
front", albeit without the participation of the two anarchist 
collectives. An interclass front that put the national question before 
the class struggle and that would soon be integrated into the Galician 
system of parties under the name of the Galician Nationalist Block (BNG).

But if in the 1980s the Galician anarchist collectives did not respond 
to the theoretical and strategic proposals that emanated from anarchist 
organizations from other nations in the Iberian territory, their focus 
on the national question did produce an effect, and a change of 
perspective in Galician anarchism with respect to the internationalist 
orthodoxy that the movement had had until then. For this new generation 
of militants, Galicia, and no longer the territory of the Spanish state, 
was the political frame of reference. This would have resonances in all 
subsequent anarchism, and up to the present day. Since then, there have 
been several attempts to articulate a Galician anarchist movement, with 
the Federación Irmandinha in the mid-1990s, Xuntanza Libertaria in 2000, 
or the Federación Anarquista Galega, which would be active between 2004 
and 20062. There was even room for a novel experience insofar as it 
responded to the emergence of a new feeling in the social movements of 
Galicia, also crossed by the national question, such as the coordinating 
Loita Autônoma mediated in the 1990s, represented by groups from A 
Guarda, Vigo, Compostela, A Coruña and Ourense. However, in Galicia, a 
mass libertarian movement with the capacity to have a real impact on 
society was never reassembled. Once the transition was complete, 
anarchism was limited to the union, cultural sphere or to partial 
struggles such as anti-prison, insubordination or squatting, and its 
entire ambition consisted of federating or coordinating the libertarian 
groups that acted in these fields or specific groups that organized 
themselves autonomously.

Nowadays, there are many people in the country who identify with the 
tradition and principles of anarchism. However, we anarchists remain 
fragmented, participating in movements in defense of the land, in 
neighborhood associations, in social centers, in unions and in cultural 
associations without an organization or a strategy that links our 
actions and gives them a global orientation. However, if in recent 
decades and recent years we have been able to draw any conclusion from 
the social struggles that have taken place in the country, it is that, 
without strategic cohesion and a revolutionary horizon, social movements 
end up exhausting themselves in the impotence of mere welfareism, or by 
turning to reformist paths, if not authoritarian deviations.

In a context like the current one, in which the institutional left finds 
itself defeated and surrendered to the capitalist project, in which the 
depredation of nature and territory is pushing residents across the 
country to self-organize in platforms of struggle in defense of their 
towns and regions, in which speculative dynamics are expelling residents 
from their homes and neighborhoods, and in which the far right is 
gaining ground in institutions, in the media and on the streets. What 
can we do as anarchists?

To try to give a collective answer to this question that arose during 
the first edition of the Galician Libertarian Studies Seminar (2024), 
some anarchist militants have just founded Xesta, Galician Anarchist 
Organization, which held its first congress this March. A tool to 
overcome the current state of isolation of anarchists on the different 
fronts of struggle in the country, and with which to equip ourselves 
with a revolutionary theory and practice. It is about remaining present 
in neighborhood organizations, work centers, land defense groups, 
neighborhood associations and other popular institutions, but having in 
the specific anarchist organization a coordination space to feed these 
struggles, to help connect them with each other and to push them towards 
overcoming the capitalist system in a libertarian socialist sense.

If in the 80s the Galician libertarian movement was not able to protect 
the political independence of the working class in the face of the 
leadership of some Marxist parties that put the alliance with the 
national bourgeoisie before the proletarian question, perhaps it was 
because the specific anarchist organizations were more focused on the 
counterculture than on generating a revolutionary project in the 
country. If at that time the Marxist parties managed to divert the cycle 
of social mobilizations from the streets to bourgeois institutions, 
replacing direct action with delegation, perhaps it was due to a lack of 
coordination between the anarchists who participated in those mass 
movements as individuals and not in an organized way and with a 
strategic vision.

Perhaps we Galician anarchists have been participating individually, and 
not as a group, in the struggles of the Galician people for too long. 
Perhaps the specific Galician organizations have been far removed from 
the interests of the Galician people for too long. Perhaps it is time to 
make a movement similar to that carried out by the Galician anarchists 
at the end of the 1930s, and which gave them such good results, and to 
get involved again in the popular struggles in an organized way. Xesta 
was born with the intention of serving as a tool for this purpose.

Dani Palleiro, militant of Xesta  Galician Anarchist Organization.


1Orrantia, Mikel (1978). For a libertarian and global alternative. 
Madrid: Zero Zyx.

2Cebrián Gorozarri, Brais (2024). A look at the recent past of 
libertarian coordination in Galicia. In Anarchism and Organization: 
Notes for the Galician Territory. Seminar on Galician Libertarian Studies.

3 
https://regeneracionlibertaria.org/2025/11/21/estratexia-e-organizacion-na-historia-do-anarquismo-galego-1871-1936/

https://regeneracionlibertaria.org/2026/04/13/estratexia-e-organizacion-na-historia-do-anarquismo-galego-1975-2025/
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