The alliance of the FA with the CNT-F, which is part of the CIT, is a political betrayal. Not a mistake, not a misunderstanding: a clear, deliberate choice, and completely outside anarchism. The CIT is everything we fight against: a bureaucratic international, a machine for reproducing power, hierarchy, and fake representation. Nothing libertarian about it. It’s a federation that works like a small syndicalist state, with its line, its bosses, its positions, its control mechanisms. And the CNT-F, by attaching its name, signed up for that. It no longer breaks; it manages. It no longer fights directly; it negotiates. It seeks respectability, position, institutional credibility. Let’s stop pretending: this is no longer anarchist. And seeing the FA go validate that is mind-blowing. You cannot claim to support autonomy, anti-authoritarianism, horizontality, and at the same time reach out to a structure that thinks and operates like a vertical apparatus.
To ally with the CNT-F/CIT is to say that management, representation, and bureaucracy are compatible with anarchism. It’s false. It’s a soft, polite betrayal, but a betrayal nonetheless. And we must say it: the part of the FA that supports this alliance is no longer anarchist in practice. It keeps the word, but it has lost the meaning. It traded radicalism for respectability. It traded direct action for corridor syndicalism. It traded coherence for compromise.
This rapprochement muddles everything: it dilutes ideas, mixes anarchism with reformist syndicalism, and gives a libertarian veneer to practices that have nothing libertarian in them. We don’t fight power by allying with an apparatus that reproduces it. We don’t defend autonomy by validating structures that organize delegation. We don’t build freedom on an international that functions like a mini-government.
When the FA accepts this, it abandons the foundation of anarchism: intransigence toward authoritarians, whether in suits, uniforms, or under red-and-black flags. The truth is simple, comrade: those in the FA who align with the CNT-F/CIT have left anarchism. Not in theory, but in practice. They have molded themselves into the shape of managerial syndicalism, disguised reformism, and they try to sell it to you as a strategic choice. But it’s just a renunciation. And a renunciation must be said, pointed out, and fought. End of story.
