"Instead of disbanding.... or confining itself to acting as a liaison secretariat between autonomous agitational or propaganda groups, the FAI was taken over in mid-1933 by a group of rootless intellectuals and economic planners.... With the coming of the Spanish Civil War three years later, the FAI had abandoned all pretense of being a revolutionary organ. Like the institutionalized CNT leadership it had helped oust in 1930-1932, the FAI had become, in its turn, a structure of vested interests serving to apply the brakes to the spontaneous revolutionary activity of the rank and file and repress the new generation of revolutionary activists among the Libertarian Youth and the 'Friends of Durruti' group. 'Anti-fascist unity' and state power were promoted at the expense of anarchist principles, while the hegemony of the CNT-FAI leadership was imposed over the local revolutionary committees and the general assemblies. Its principal aim had become to perpetuate itself, even at the expense of the revolutionary anarchist principles that had inspired it: the instrumental means had become the organizational end." - Stuart Christie, We, the Anarchists!
