Ramiro Ledesma Ramos, The Creator of National-Syndicalism

This text by Antonio Medrano was translated by Georges Gondinet and published in n° 13 of the magazine Totalité.

The figure and the work of Ramiro Ledesma Ramos, nearly unknown outside of Spain and even in Spain, eclipsed by the influence of the heritage of José Antonio, deserves to be presented to the eyes of new European generations, to be brought to the consciousness of those who search for a revolutionary way of radical reconstruction and traditional normalization, for prostrated Europe today and for the decadent West. And this, not only because Ramiro Ledesma was one the most brilliant thinkers of the Spanish national revolution, the genial creator of national-syndicalism, the great precursor of the Falangist movement and the national uprising of July 18^th 1936, a man of action and thought whose message possesses much life and timeliness, but also because the analysis of his work lends itself to a propitious discussion of a series of doctrinal considerations of the greatest importance for today, where disorientation begins to make itself felt in an acute manner among the youth milieus who wish to vigorously search for an alternative to the system.

Ramiro Ledesma was born in 1905 in a small village in the province of Zamora, to a modest family. “The grandson of peasants,” as Juan Aparicio said of him, he knew since his first years the resigned and hash life of Castillian peasants. And for “his peasant roots, his stubborn Sayago ancestry” would lead to this “inner hardness” that would characterize him much later throughout his intense work. His father was a country schoolteacher, and he received from him his primary instruction and the bases of what would be his intellectual formation, solid and expansive. The teaching he received, to which he added an iron will and an intense study regimen, later opened the doors of the university to him, then reserved for a small minority, and permitted him to obtain a professional career from which he earned a modest living, taking, after having passed two competitive exams, an administrative post in the Madrid postal administration. Two facts that would have a decisive influence on the configuration of his destiny.

Santiago Montero Diaz, one of his faithful companions, distinguishes three clearly differentiated periods in the life of Ledesma: a literary period, during which he wrote his essays, tales, and novels of a violent and heartbreaking romantic tone; a philosophical period, in which the passion for knowledge and science arose in Ledesma, and a political period, during which he fully devoted himself to action and to the theoretical work of creating a new movement.

His works El seflo de la muerte (1924) and El Quijote y nuestro tiempo(1925 ; unpublished until 1971) in which he profiles the vigor of his passionate personality date from the first period– of the latter, Tomas Borras said that it “seemed to announce from afar the Don Quixotism of the Crusade.” In the second period Ledesma discovered the world of philosophy and science: at the time he took courses in philosophy and literature and physical – mathematical sciences, two domains in which he would succeed brilliantly. He imposed on himself an iron work ethnic thanks to which he acquired a solid and extended education as few did in his time. “The long hours of study,” wrote Montero Diaz, “brought him considerable scientific assets, some of the most effective and cultured that had been achieved in his generation.” The methodological rigor of the philosophical and mathematical disciplines left an indelible mark on his character, a mark that would display itself in his sober, concise, striking style, full of logic and expressive richness. At this time this admiration for the work of Kant, Scheller, Heidegger, Hegel, and above all Nietzsche, whose impact on his interior life would be decisive, was born. He was also passionate about new contributions to Spanish intellectual life, especially for the work of Unamuno and that of Ortega. He would become the disciple and collaborator of the latter, and would collaborate on different works and translations in the Revista de Occidente, the prestigious publication directed by Ortega, which then represented the pinnacle of Spanish thought. “If his personal and irrevocable fate – equally united in an irrevocable and personal manner with the destiny of Spain – had not interrupted the first duties of his intellectual life, Ramiro would figure in the history of Spanish culture as one of our first philosophers.” (S. Montero Diaz). José Maria Sanchez Diana called him “The Spanish Fichte of the 20^th Century.”

[caption id="attachment_6204" align="aligncenter" width="600"] "Only the rich can afford not to have a country." - Ramiro Ledesma Ramos[/caption]

Finally, in the years 1929 and 1930, under the influence of Nietzsche and Maurras and before the turbulent events that would happen in Spain and Europe, his political vocation awoke. In his response to an inquiry on “What is the avant-garde?” published in Gaceta Llteraria in July 1930, Ledesma affirmed that from liberals to socialists to Catholics to monarchists “all fail to grasp the secret of Spain today, self-affirming, nationalist, and with the will to power.” The same year, he made a study excursion to Germany, where he would be impressed by the paramilitary formations of Hitler’s movement and by his violent fight against Marxism. In February 1931, barely 25 years old, he threw himself into politics, with the famous Political Manifesto of the Conquest of the State, one of the most important and most creative documents in Spanish political history. In March of the same year, he published the first issue of the periodical La Conquista del Estado, which would have an unfortunately brief lifespan due to continual governmental repression. These were the critical moments in which parliamentary monarchy was struggling for its last gasps and where the proclamation of the Republic was already imminent. The Conquista del Estado, whose name could not be more eloquent, was born with the goal, not to be a simple organ of expression, but to rally around itself “Falanges of the youth” who would complete the Spanish revolution.

In November 1932, the group La Conquista del Estado merged with the Juntas Castellanas de Actuacion Hispanica of Onésimo Redondo, from this merger the JONS, Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional-Sindicalista, was born, in which Ramiro would be the principal ideological mentor and the first activist. These were years of intense and exhausting struggle, which followed the creation of JONS; years of intense effort to spread cells of the new organization across the entire Fatherland. The effort of Ledesma would principally aim to win over young Marxist and anarchist militants to the national idea. “He was obsessed with the nationalization of the syndicalist masses” and “he made desperate and magnificent efforts to give the violent, deracinated, and anarchist multitudes of the CNT a national content, in the sense of the Fatherland, of filial love for Spain.” (Guillén Salaya). The success of his apostolate is testified by names such as Santiago Montera Diaz, Manuel Mateo, Alvarez de Sotomayor, Francisco Bravo, Sinforiano Moldes and Emilio Gutiérrez Palmas, all former communists or CNT members.

[caption id="attachment_6203" align="aligncenter" width="438"] José Antonio Primo de Rivera and Ramiro Ledesma Ramos 1934[/caption]

In February 1934 the merger of the JONS with the Falange Española, the new movement of National-Revolutionary inspiration lead by José Antonio Primo de Rivera, took place. The new organization took the name of FE de las JONS, and Ramiro, who received membership card number 1, was part of the first triumvirate assumed collective direction of the movement, with Ruiz de Aida and José Antonio.

In 1935, Ramiro Ledesma, in disagreement with the line of Falangist movement (according to his diagnosis: freezing of revolutionary spirit, passivity and inactivity, immersion in sterile parliamentary politics, growing presence of writers disconnected from the preoccupations of the people and the true political vocation, excessive “rightness” of the party, etc), separated from the Falange with a minority of JONSists established in different Spanish regions. In the months that followed, as usually happens in such cases, a series of lamentable incidents and violent confrontations took place, not simply verbal, between the dissident group and the organization in which they militated. During this same year, Ledesma founded the periodical Patria Libre and wrote his work Fascismo en Espana ? That related, from a bitterly critical point of view, the history of Spanish Fascism and ,especially, the Falange. He also published the celebratedDiscurso a las juventudes de Espana, the most important of his works, a classic of Spanish national political thought. In this book, more concerned with tactics and strategy rather than theory, he traces the route that the national revolution must lead for the Spanish youth, the only force capable of saving the Fatherland, by putting itself at the head of the masses.

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