Politics & Power Quote by Buenaventura Durruti

A government that claims to be antifascist, Durruti suggests, is often just managing fascism, not defeating it. The line is built like a trap: it starts with an absolute - "No government" - then swivels to the real target, the bourgeois state itself. That bluntness is the point. Durruti isn’t offering a theory seminar; he’s issuing a field report from an era when Spain’s elites and institutions repeatedly treated right-wing violence as a tolerable tool against labor and the left.

The subtext is accusation by diagnosis. Fascism isn’t framed as a freak outbreak of mass hysteria but as a rational instrument of class preservation. "Brings up" is almost domestic language, like raising an animal, implying cultivation, funding, protection. It smuggles in a whole history of police leniency, judicial indulgence, and respectable politicians making their peace with street militias as long as the targets are strikers, anarchists, and socialists.

Context matters: Durruti was an anarchist militant who watched parliamentary maneuvering fail, watched repression escalate, then watched the Spanish Republic appeal to order while tolerating the forces that would later crush it. His intent is to strip liberal innocence from the story. If fascism is a last-ditch shield for "privileges", then waiting for the state to save you is not just naive; it’s structurally impossible.

Rhetorically, the quote works because it denies the audience the comforting plotline where institutions self-correct. It replaces it with a colder one: when power panics, it outsources brutality.