Communiqué on the dissolution of the Federación Ibérica de Juventudes Libertarias (FIJL)

It was the end of the 1980s when the FIJL resumed its activity after years of inactivity. Since then, and even since its origin, different people and groups have always tried to take steps forward towards a process of struggle and social transformation from this Federation. Our organisation has had a history of its own, the history of many great people who have left their efforts and even their lives fighting to achieve our goal as anarchists. We have tried to contribute just a grain of sand in this work.

It was in the context of the influence of certain “new” currents in anarchism that the coup of September 2003 took place. The situation was not easy, a government on the rampage and a movement immersed in a repressive spiral (arrests and prosecutions in Madrid, Valencia, Asturias, Barcelona, ...) and fierce social isolation. Six of our comrades were arrested and a seventh fled.

The causes that influenced the FIJL’s inability to stand up to that coup or to respond adequately can be explained in part by certain political attitudes adopted by our own movement (such as those that led part of it to break with the classic organisations because of the events in Cordoba), by the weakness of our own organisation and in part also by a certain halo of radicalism that came with those “insurrectionalist” currents that we had made our own. 2003 was another step in the separation between anarchists that we still have today.

This time the blows have succeeded in bringing down an organisation. But it is not only these attacks that have led us to take this decision, but also a self-critical analysis of what we were doing, the separation (territorial and political), the difficulty to meet (among others, due to security issues), the immersion in other projects, and so on. We have tried several times over the years to get the organisation up and running again, but we have never succeeded.

For months now we have been in contact with groups from the Iberian Federation of Anarchist Youth who have shown their interest in our organisational situation and, if it were the case, in recovering an acronym that has not seen the light of day for almost ten years.

For all these reasons we have taken the decision to dissolve the Iberian Federation of Libertarian Youth.

The history of the FIJL is a burden that we hope will not slow down the comrades if they decide to take up the federation again. Every era is different and we hope with all our strength that they will forge their own path as we once tried to do. They will have all our encouragement and support when they need it. It is the duty of all anarchists to pass on our experience so that people entering our movement do not fall into the folklore and unreason that isolation imposes on us. Without arrogance and without evangelising anyone we must explain what has been done, why and what has been gained and lost because only together we will manage to get anarchism out of this impasse in which it got stuck decades ago and which makes it inaccessible to most people and incapable of responding to reality.

We will try to make a self-criticism and analyse what we have done as a federation since the last reconstruction so that we can all collectively think about the failures and successes of this organisational form and the lines we follow.

If anarchism wants to regain the strength it once had, it must undertake the hard exercise of questioning its strategies, discourses and practices. We have lived in pigeonholes for thirty years and our movement has only gone backwards. Only by reinventing and reorganising ourselves can we take a step forward. The social situation will become more and more unstable in the coming years and, as a revolutionary force, our movement and we ourselves must rise to the challenge of the times to come.

For all these reasons we have decided, as we announced before, to leave the acronym FIJL to those groups that want to continue their history of anarchist struggle and we wish them the best of encouragement and the firm convictions that their work requires.

A strong anarchist embrace to all comrades.

Long live anarchy, long live social revolution!