(en) France, Alternative Libertaire AL (September) - Read:
Freddy Gomez "Shards of anarchy" (fr, it, pt) [machine translation]
Precise writing an informative narration, often relevant analysis: these are the memoirs
of Freddy Gomez, leader of the journal Discrete A Contretemps. ---- Since 2001, this
demanding form of "critical literature" - now exclusively on the web - was distinguished
by his taste for a demystified history of the libertarian movement. Being in the same
vein, the 500 pages of these Shards of anarchy, subtitled "Memory Passage" does not
disappoint expectations. ---- Childhood Freddy Gomez, it's the middle of the Spanish Exile
in Paris for years 1950-1960: a chick life, mutual help, the appointments of Sunday at the
headquarters of the CNT, Sainte-Marthe , ceremonial meetings in red and black, but also
the camaraderie dissension among defeated the Franco regime, eyes riveted on Spain now out
of reach.
It is then the Lycée Michelet in Vanves, temple of boredom and authority in gray blouse,
whose instances are literally swept away by the flood of May 68. There follows, for part
of his generation, fire Fireworks of unbridled leftism. Gomez, a quickly hardening are
removed her foot. The old anarcho-syndicalist culture of his parents, very prosaic, seems
preserve the existential and spontaneists runaways that characterize the time.
In fact, Gomez Freddy is a militant wary of those who support the libertarian movement
from the outside, but avoid to engage in it fully. This position could drag it to the role
of the commentator "independent" complacent or give lessons as we know too much. It is
not. In his book, he avoids judgments to the punch, he chooses his words, he nuance,
trying to examine the past so both human and lucid.
It thus delivers harsh comments on the action of the Iberian Liberation Movement (MIL) at
the end of Francoism and a little melancholy some analysis of the flash reconstruction of
the Spanish CNT and its irresistible "deconstruction" between 1975 and 1978. At the time,
Gomez lives between France and Spain, and participates in the journal Frente Libertario,
emanation of a trend of Exile, which seeks to achieve the junction between the historic
anarcho-syndicalism and new forms and societal challenge of working in the peninsula.
It was at this time that he made a series of interviews with witnesses capital of the
Spanish Revolution - Diego Abad de Santillán, Felix Carrasquer, Juan García Oliver, Jose
Peirats, among others.
After his Spanish period, Freddy Gomez "resumes the collar" and, in the 1980s, became an
activist for the CGT-correctors, union "like no other" which, embedded in this bastion of
Stalinist what the federation Book, maintains its revolutionary syndicalist referent. This
is a time when the technological revolution in the news upsets all the marks of a working
class ordered to adapt or disappear. Gomez decrypts dissonant strategies that coexisted in
this regard within the federation of the Book.
These memories are completed on more recent memories, related the adventure of the
magazine A Setback from 2001, and on more general considerations - on the issue of
violence on trade unionism... He also devotes some bitter pages postmodernist vogue 1970s
which, nestled in against the liberal revolution, has worked to disarm revolutionary thought.
Guillaume Davranche (AL Montreuil)
Freddy Gomez, anarchy Shards - Memory Passage, conversations with Guillaume Drop, ed. Rue
waterfalls, 2015, 496 pages, 18 euros.
http://www.alternativelibertaire.org/?Lire-Freddy-Gomez-Eclats-d
