Leadership Quote by Frederica Montseny

The line does a neat bit of ideological jiu-jitsu: it takes a movement defined by suspicion of authority and reframes it as a tradition of duty. Montseny, a leading anarchist and a rare woman at the top of Spain's revolutionary politics, isn’t waxing sentimental about “the people.” She’s issuing an operational directive. “Fully realise our aspirations” is future-facing and conditional; the revolution doesn’t arrive by moral correctness alone. It arrives, she implies, by social discipline on a mass scale.

The key word is “create.” Anarchism often prides itself on spontaneity and bottom-up agency, but Montseny’s verb smuggles in an organizer’s mindset: consciousness is made, cultivated, taught. That’s not hypocrisy so much as wartime realism. In Civil War Spain, where she served as Minister of Health in the Republican government, the anarchist movement had to prove it could administer, endure, and coordinate against fascism. Sacrifice becomes a political technology: a way to sustain militias, collectivized workplaces, rationing, and public health measures without the usual coercive levers of a state.

Her appeal to “historic development in Spain” is also a claim to legitimacy. She’s not asking for obedience to a party line; she’s invoking a national lineage of anarchist struggle - the CNT-FAI’s culture of mutual aid, risk, and often martyrdom - to make responsibility feel native rather than imposed. The subtext is blunt: without a shared ethic of self-limitation, the revolution collapses into factionalism, black-market individualism, or the very authoritarianism it’s meant to replace.