1. The editor, Sam Dolgoff, interpolated into this passage his own interpretations, which I have omitted here. Dolgoff's own preference for syndicalism often seems to have colored his interpretation of Bakunin's writings.

2. "Since in the fully-formed proletariat the abstraction of all humanity, even of the semblance of humanity, is practically complete; since the conditions of life of the proletariat sum up all the conditions of life of society today in their most inhuman form; since man has lost himself in the proletariat, yet at the same time has not only gained theoretical consciousness of the loss, but through urgent, no longer removable, no longer disguisable, absolutely imperative need--practical expression of necessity--is driven directly to revolt against this inhumanity, it follows that the proletariat can and must emancipate itself. But it cannot emancipate itself without abolishing the conditions of its own life." Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Holy Family (Moscow: Progress Publisher, 1956), p. 47. A volume could be written on the bases, nature, and prognoses of Marx and Engels in this passage. It essentially underpins the anarcho-syndicalist positions on the hegemony of the proletariat but with greater sophistication.

3. It is worth noting that a present-day anarcho-syndicalist journalist, Ulrike Heider, dismisses Malatesta as a mere "utopian" and derogates Vernon Richards merely for engaging in a dispute with Sam Dolgoff, to whom she rather fervently applies the sobriquet "the last anarchist." This arrogant fatuity, I suppose, should finally settle the future of anarchism for good, now that Dolgoff is no longer with us, which gives us some insight into the dogmatism of at least one anarcho-syndicalist. Despite Dolgoff's mutations from anarcho-syndicalism to "free socialism" in the mid-1960s and then back to anarcho-syndicalism after the CNT reemerged in the 1970s, he seems to have been Heider's guru. See her Die Narren der Freiheit (Berlin: Karin Kramer Verlag, 1992).

4. Eduardo Pons Prado, it may be noted, also figures prominently in the excellent Granada Films series The Spanish Civil War, which contains original interviews with both leading figures and ordinary participants in the conflict.

5. I speak of Brenan's "Andalusian approach," because he had a strong tendency to overstate the "primitiveness" of Spanish anarchism as an agrarian movement. In fact, Spanish anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism were predominantly urban by the 1930s and were more strongly rooted, at least in membership, in the northeastern part of Spain than in the south.

6. The appalling thrust of the CNT's syndicalist leadership in the direction of a virtually authoritarian organization--or what Abad de Santillán called "the Communist line" (as cited by Peirats) in policy as well as in structure--dramatizes more forcefuly than I can describe Malatesta's prescience and the fragility of the organization's commitment to "libertarian communism."

7. See Fraser's interview with Pons Prado in Blood of Spain, p. 223. I also rely here on my own interviews with Peirats in Toulouse and with Laval in Paris in September 1967.

8. In other respects, Borkenau's book is of much less value, especially where he contends that Spanish anarchism was the substitute for a Spanish Reformation and that the movement was entirely millennarian in nature.