Success Quote by Buenaventura Durruti

Durruti’s line is a ultimatum disguised as clarity: politics stripped of committee-room nuance and reduced to a fork in the road. It’s not just rhetoric of conviction; it’s rhetoric of mobilization. By framing the Spanish struggle as “only two roads,” he deliberately abolishes the comfort of neutrality, the idea that ordinary people can sit the moment out and still keep their lives intact. You choose, or your circumstances will choose for you.

The pairing is sharp and asymmetrical. “Victory for the working class” is immediately translated into “freedom,” a word broad enough to recruit beyond anarchist circles while still implying a social order remade from below. The other outcome is defined not as “defeat” but as “victory for the fascists,” then rendered as “tyranny,” a term that turns a political opponent into an existential threat. That’s the subtext: fascism isn’t a rival program; it’s the cancellation of politics itself.

The final sentence does the real work. “Both combatants know what’s in store for the loser” isn’t prophecy; it’s a reminder of the stakes as lived reality in 1936: prison, execution, reprisals, the crushing of unions and militias, the erasure of local autonomy. It also functions as psychological discipline. If everyone knows the loser’s fate, then hesitation becomes a kind of self-betrayal, and compromise reads as surrender in slow motion. Durruti is selling urgency as a moral fact, because in civil war, urgency is strategy.