Aging & Wisdom Quote by Frederica Montseny

There is a stubborn, almost defiant calm in Montseny’s insistence on not changing: it’s the language of continuity deployed as a weapon. “We Anarchists” isn’t just a label; it’s a collective identity meant to outlast the state’s churn, party splits, and the opportunism that politics rewards. By framing her stance as stable “as of old,” she’s not merely defending doctrine. She’s preempting an accusation that always haunts radicals who enter real governance: compromise equals betrayal.

That subtext matters because Montseny wasn’t speaking from a safe distance. As a prominent Spanish anarchist and a minister during the Spanish Civil War, she inhabited the central contradiction of anarchism in crisis: how to fight fascism and administer a war without reproducing the very coercive structures anarchists reject. Her phrasing reads like damage control aimed at comrades uneasy with collaboration, and at enemies eager to paint anarchists as naive, chaotic, or conveniently malleable.

The intent is also strategic: “never changed our position” recasts flexibility as perseverance. It’s an attempt to stabilize a movement’s moral narrative when history is pressuring it to fracture. The line works because it’s less about policy than about legitimacy. In moments when ideology can become a luxury, Montseny treats it as a backbone, arguing that the movement’s credibility rests not on winning office but on refusing to let circumstance rewrite its ends.