Politics & Power Quote by Frederica Montseny

Montseny’s line lands like a challenge flung across borders: stop theorizing about Spanish anarchism from a safe distance and come look at the wreckage up close. The intent is defensive and prosecutorial at once. She’s not asking for sympathy; she’s daring foreign comrades to witness the compromises, coercions, and internal fractures that Spanish anarchists were living through in real time.

The subtext is a rebuke to the international left’s bad habit of treating Spain as a moral parable. In the 1930s, “Spanish Anarchism” wasn’t an abstract doctrine but a mass movement under siege - by Franco’s forces, by material scarcity, and by the Republican camp’s own power struggles. Montseny, a leading CNT-FAI figure who became a government minister during the Civil War, speaks from inside that contradiction. Her “what we are doing” reads as both confession and accusation: the movement is being reshaped by war’s demands, and the people judging it often ignore the conditions forcing those choices.

Why it works is the pronoun trap. “They do not understand” draws a hard line between lived experience and imported certainty; “we are doing” implicates her own side, refusing the clean innocence of victimhood. The imagined test - “come to Spain… see how they would react” - exposes how quickly ideological purity collapses when faced with famine, bombardment, and the need to coordinate power. It’s an argument for situational ethics, but also a warning: solidarity that survives only at the level of slogans isn’t solidarity at all.