Antonio Manzanera and the Criminalization of Anarchism: History in the Service of the Status Quo

Historian Antonio Ángel Manzanera Escribano wrote two Spanish-language articles in 2025 on the subject of anarchism: these were “Anarchist Justice in the Spanish Civil War and Its Impact on Memory: the Case of the Argentinean Lucio Ruano” in Cuadernos de Historia. Serie Economía y Sociedad, No 35, pp. 143-176 and “Visions of Catalan Anarchism in the Civil War: the Case of Justo Bueno Pérez” in Cuadernos Republicanos, No 118, pp. 17-65

This was Agustín Guillamón’s response.

Antonio Ángel Manzanera Escribano’s articles on Lucio Ruano and Justo Bueno are neither critical history nor rigorous social analysis. They are ideological exercises with the blatant political intention of representing revolutionary violence as moral pathology and reducing anarchism to a catalogue of individual offences. The aim is not to ferret out historical truth but to offer retrospective justification for a conservative outlook in which any attempt at insurrection seems to be a mistake, a crime or an act of madness.

1. Non-existent Neutrality: History viewed through the prism of the Bourgeois Present

Manzanera does not start from the 1936 social revolution but from the contemporary bourgeois order, which he views with diffident retrospection. His articles are not out to understand how workers’ power operated at the height of the Spanish Civil War, but rather to show that it ought never to have happened. This lack of neutrality explains why his analyses distort the contexts and delete key factors such as State repression, structural unlawfulness and the social warfare predating the fascist revolt.

2. Ruano: Scandal as Historiographical Method

In his article on Lucio Ruano, Manzanera shows Ruano not as a product of a radicalized civil war and class struggles but instead as a criminal enjoying CNT backing and the protection of Durruti.

This article depicts Ruano as an anarchist leader with a prior “criminal record” and it highlights his friendship with Durruti, depicting the whole thing as if everything he did was sheer criminality.

The fact that the CNT’s own Metalworkers’ Union was to sentence Ruano to death for what he did does not bolster Manzanera’s thesis about an organization that was tolerant of criminals: in fact, it reveals a collective and class-based brand of internal political justice that demolishes his core contention about an uncritical complicity. However, the article downplays this key factor.

3. Justo Bueno: Criminalizing Militancy

Manzanera’s article on Justo Bueno Pérez appears in Cuadernos Republicanos, No 118 (CIERE) in 2025, wherein the author offers a narrative that tends to represent Bueno as a “maverick criminal”, playing down any analysis of his political and historical context.

In this piece, Manzanera shies away from analysis of the historical and social function of the so-called “action man” inside libertarian organizations in times of revolution. Justo Bueno’s life is portrayed as a parade of crimes, with nary a mention of the factors such as war, repression and social strife that actually shaped what he did.

4. An Approach that offers, not Analysis but Indictment

Both articles by Manzanera have a common theme: taking controversial individuals out of context, over-stating their clout and turning them into metaphors for an anarchism that is allegedly inherently violent or pathological. This is not historiography: it is history in the ideological dock. The civil war factor in terms of a collapse of the State, the repression enforced by the authorities and the structural instability of the times is deliberately left out of the equation. 

These are not isolated methodological faux pas; this is a consistent policy line; depicting marginal figures as representative of a whole labour movement and, by extension, retrospectively de-legitimizing revolutionary struggle as an historical option.

5. The Author and his Ideological Function

That these analyses are being offered by an economist trained in traditional institutions such as the Bank of Spain and a man experienced in financial management is not something that has no bearing. His training and trajectory speak of an ideological stance that is out to preserve the established order and view social struggles through the prism of bourgeois morality rather than historical analysis of class relations.

Conclusion

Antonio Manzanera’s articles add nothing to historical knowledge of anarchism: they impoverish and warp it. They are of no help to any understanding of the revolution; instead, they retrospectively defuse it, turning it into a moral caution and a repressive threat. As against this archival history in which neither the people nor classes figure, the mission remains standing up for workers’ memory on foot of conflict and class struggle rather than from the vantage-point of the bourgeois moralizing that Manzanera regurgitates. 

Because, as far as Manzanera is concerned, the real scandal of 1936 was neither Ruano nor Bueno: it was the fact that the workers tried to take power. 

From Cuadernos Republicanos, No 121, Spring-Summer 2026, ISSN 1131-7744 https://ciere.org/pdfdownload.php?doc=69 

Translated by: Paul Sharkey.