In December 2014, several anarchists were arrested in Spain and accused of being part of “coordinated anarchist groups with terrorist ends” that plan to “seriously upset the public space.” The arrests were part of a series of coordinated raids dubbed “Operation Pandora”.

During the initial raid, Spanish authorities made much of the discovery of a book titled “Contra la Democracia” (“Against Democracy”) that critiques democracy. The book was recently translated into English (here’s a PDF version suitable for printing and distribution) and it provides a good starting point towards developing an anarchist critique of democracy. While some of the text necessarily focuses on Spain, it provides an important theoretical and historical evaluation of democracy.

Some comrades in Spain wrote of the book and its discovery:

It seems that, in the police searches, numerous copies of a book called “Against Democracy” [“Contra la democracia”] were found. This book attempts to provide tools of reflection and debate for those who oppose democracy, that mythicized and deified system that we are all obligated to venerate and defend, given that if we don’t, we run the risk of ending up with our bones in the State’s dungeons. However, we know that democracy is precisely the following, the same story once again: repression and incarceration of all those who raise their heads and fight daily for the destruction of all Authority and the construction of a new world that works based on horizontality and mutual aid, in which all vestiges of Power have disappeared.

Democracy is, necessarily, prison, the police, pistols and bombs, wage labour, schools as centres of indoctrination and distortion, psychiatrists, merchandise, the Parliament, government and domination as a form of “organizing” society…; democracy is simply one more way that the State and Capital, the dominant minority, have of administering their system of oppression. It’s because of this that, as anarchists, we declare war against democracy and any other system of domination and Power;

More on Operation Pandora and ongoing repression against anarchists in Spain can be found at https://efectopandora.wordpress.com/