Politics & Power Quote by Frederica Montseny

There is nothing tidy or ceremonial in Montseny’s vow; it’s a blunt accounting of what antifascism costs when it stops being a slogan and becomes a lived emergency. “The struggle is so great” does more than gesture at hardship. It frames fascism not as one policy dispute among many, but as an existential force that makes ordinary political calculation feel obscene. In that light, “triumph…alone” is a cold narrowing of the horizon: no promised utopia, no guaranteed social peace, just the minimum win that makes any future imaginable.

The sentence is also doing internal discipline. By declaring the victory “worth the sacrifice of our lives,” Montseny isn’t only speaking to the enemy; she’s addressing allies tempted by compromise, fatigue, or factional squabbling. It’s a moral ultimatum aimed at her own side: if the price feels too high, that’s the point. Fascism is designed to make resistance seem irrational.

Context sharpens the stakes. Montseny was a leading anarchist and the first woman to serve as a minister in Spain, operating amid the Spanish Civil War’s brutal contradictions: revolution alongside state power, idealism alongside mass violence, unity constantly undermined by ideological infighting. Her phrasing carries that tension. An anarchist invoking sacrifice can sound like the language of states and armies, yet it also reads as a refusal to let fascism set the terms of what a human life is worth. The subtext: better to risk death than live under a regime that turns survival into collaboration.