Revolution and collectivization in Spain — Social Ecology and Communalism Workshop

(1936-1937)

I – The why of history

“Who controls the present controls the past and who controls the past controls the future. (… ). All of history thus became a palimpsest, scraped and rewritten as often as necessary. In no case would it have been possible to demonstrate the existence of a falsification.” George Orwell: 1984

It is no coincidence that the Zapatistas define their struggle ‘as a rebellion of memory against oblivion’. In fact, in this neoliberal world of the ‘perpetual present’¹ , ‘The time of production, commodity-time, is an infinite accumulation of equivalent intervals’.²

In order to carry out the rebellion against oblivion, we must set history in motion again, beginning by detaching it from political economy, which actively lives in us, in the form of a continuous and unstoppable vector directed towards “progress”. It is a question of freeing ourselves from the control over our body and mind exercised by this political economy, whose presence is even more noticeable because it is not identified by name. After more than 300 years of violently imposing its social relations and, thanks to the increasing colonization of our minds and its “newspeak”, Capitalism has managed to convince us of its “normality”. That is why it seems the most natural thing in the world, for example, to sell our labor power to cover our existential needs or for production to decide our needs and not the other way around.

Returning to the history of the origins of capitalism means discovering with horror, and not only in times of crisis, the constant violence it exercises and the structural and therefore inevitable destructive nature it presents. It means, moreover and above all, recovering the collective memory and retracing the steps of the incessant efforts to defeat it. Otherwise, ignorant and orphaned by all the attempts at emancipation, we are condemned to the fate of a perpetual present with no future. It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

Returning to face these questions is not at all a pastime or a gratuitous intellectual reasoning legitimized academically by some doctorate. Rather, it is a question of instilling that memory in a process of commitment — as a prior and necessary step — and of mixing it with our imagination, just as we do whenever we set out to create something new. Learning from the past without idealizing it consists precisely of showing ourselves to be humble and avoiding locking ourselves into labels and ideologies. It also means trying not to repeat the mistakes of our predecessors, learning from their successes, recovering our self-confidence, giving content and intelligibility to our incipient projects of emancipation and endowing them with the enthusiasm that, in itself, can move mountains.

In this way, the history of Spain in the 1930s is a good opportunity to join our Zapatista brothers and sisters in our common struggle in favor of history, against oblivion and for the creation of a new possible world. The collectivizations, especially in the province of Aragon liberated from the State and from large landowners, are the measure of our collective intelligence in a creative and emancipatory dynamic. All this without forgetting, of course, to situate these achievements in the revolutionary context of the time and the primacy of the anarchist movement throughout the country.

After a brief summary of the history of this movement in Spain from its beginnings, with the creation of the Spanish section of the International Workers’ Association (IWA) in 1870, we will follow the eventful course of its evolution and consolidation. The admirable popular reaction against the military coup d’état of July 18, 1936, gave rise to the greatest revolution of the 20th century, according to Guy Debord. After analyzing its genesis, its successes and also its mistakes, we will try to see to what extent the collectivizations that took place during the period between 1936 and 1939 can provide us — despite the completely different context — with certain indispensable lessons here and now.

II – The background: 1870-1936

1) Birth and consolidation, 1870-1920

The libertarian movement took root in Spain after the First International (founded in 1864), especially through the anarcho-syndicalist current, which became hegemonic within the workers’ movement. The latter was almost asphyxiated during Franco’s dictatorship and only manifested itself clandestinely. Legalized after the “Transition” of 1978, this movement is now mainly represented by two organizations: the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo and the Confederación General del Trabajo.

In 1870, the Madrid section of the International had 200 members and soon established itself in Barcelona, where the 1870 workers’ congress brought together delegates from some 150 workers’ organizations that formed the Spanish Regional Federation (FRE), with the presence of thousands of observers.

The FRE quickly became one of the largest sections of the International Workingmen’s Association: in 1872 it had 11,500 members, and in 1873 it had over 40,000. Following the destruction of the Canton of Cartagena and the uprisings in Alcoy and Sanlúcar de Barrameda, the International was declared illegal on January 11, 1874.

In 1881, the government led by Práxedes Mateo Sagasta approved the Law of Associations, which legalized the activity of workers’ organizations. In September 1881, the first congress was organized to create a new workers’ federation. The meeting was held once again in the Teatro del Circo in Barcelona, where the FRE-AIT had been founded in 1870, and from there the Federation of Workers of the Spanish Region (FTRE) emerged from the FRE.

In its new phase, the FTRE evolved very quickly and in 1882 it held its Second Congress (in Seville), in which 663 sections and a total of 57,934 members participated.

In the first months of 1883, the State carried out a very harsh repression based on three crimes committed at the end of 1882. As a result, 15 peasants were sentenced to death, of whom 7 were executed in Jerez de la Frontera on June 14, 1884. In 1879 the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, the PSOE, was created, which in turn founded the General Union of Workers (UGT) in 1888.

In the workforce-owned companies, as well as in the cooperatives and cultural centers, the unions incorporated many schools for adult workers as a way of bringing culture to the whole town. The workers would take their children to the modern or rationalist schools, and they themselves would take night classes at the adult education centers.

In 1901, Francisco Ferrer y Guardia founded the Modern School, whose main objective was to educate the working class in a rationalist, secular and non-coercive way. The first mixed, secular school in Barcelona was very poorly received by the clergy and their devotees. In 1906, a good excuse was found to close it, as its librarian, Mateo Morral,

attempted to assassinate King Alfonso XIII. It was then reopened, only to be closed again during the Tragic Week of 1909, when the authorities shot Ferrer even though he had not participated in the events.

Despite the bloody repression, the seed had been sown and the anarchists considered that a new national trade union organization was needed to strengthen the labor movement, which lacked a coordinating body at that level³. It went from the local to the regional, and then to the national level. Thus, the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) was founded in October 1910 during a congress of the Catalan federation Solidaridad Obrera. This confederal organization was structured according to need and against any kind of bureaucracy. At the beginning it lacked a permanent administration, which was very scarce even at its peak, when it had more than 1,500,000 members. Its method of direct action was nourished by and reinforced a popular practice already present in the life of the neighborhoods; in fact, it entered quite naturally and created networks of information and neighborhood committees. In the 1930s, these committees intensified strikes, not only in factories but also in neighborhoods, and then boycotts such as the rent boycott, demonstrations — often with barricades —, collective expropriations, etc.

The objective of the CNT appears in a resolution adopted at one of its congresses: “to accelerate the economic emancipation of the working class through the revolutionary expropriation of the bourgeoisie”. At the beginning, the CNT was a small organization, with about 30,000 members (the UGT already had 46,000).

For years, repression, strikes and insurrections followed one another at a rapid pace, and the revolutionary general strike of 1917 was harshly repressed by the government and resulted in the deaths of some 70 people.

However, the First Congress of the Regional Confederation of Catalonia, which was held in Barcelona (in the Sants neighborhood) between June 28 and July 1, 1918, revealed spectacular growth. In October 1918 the Confederation had 81,000 members (67,000 in the province of Barcelona), and in November around 114,000.

The important victory achieved with the great strike of the first months of 1919 against the Anglo-Canadian company Riegos y Fuerzas del Ebro led Spain to be the first state in Europe to legislate the eight-hour working day. The CNT thus became one of the main players in the industrial world and a reference point for workers, but its aspirations were greater. Anarchist radicalism was at its height and many militants discussed the possibility of moving towards revolution. In the early months of 1920, this union had more than a million members and its internal structures had been strengthened. The UGT also grew considerably during this period, from 160,000 members in 1919 to 240,000 in 1921.

Until 1920, the CNT, which had other very different concerns, had ignored the growing strength of the employers’ gunmen, grouped in the organization called “Los Sindicatos Libres” (The Free Trade Unions), but then the anarchist groups of the CNT reacted and created “action groups” to retaliate against each of the attacks. For several years, shootings became commonplace in Barcelona. This spiral of violence even led to the assassination of the president of the government, Eduardo Dato, for having signed the so-called “escape law”⁴. However, the anarchists suffered significant losses, such as those of Salvador Seguí, Francesc Layret (his lawyer) and the assassination attempt on Ángel Pestaña.

The policy that Primo de Rivera maintained during his dictatorship (1923-1930) with respect to the unions consisted of treating the CNT and the UGT differently. On the one hand, the socialists were seduced and, on the other, the CNT was criminalized and suffered implacable repression. As the latter could not act publicly, the most radical current of anarchism founded the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI) in July 1927 in Valencia. This organization, initially secret, counteracted the internal reformism of the CNT, avoided collaboration with other political tendencies and supported constructive initiatives of a libertarian and anti-capitalist spirit such as cooperatives, agricultural colonies, schools, etc.

2) The insurrectionary cycle, 1931-1933

Under the recently established Second Republic, which succeeded the monarchy and its dictatorship, the demonstration on May 1, 1931 in Barcelona ended in a shootout with the Civil Guard. The CNT demanded in vain that the government dissolve this repressive body. Finally, the Telefónica strike that took place in Seville in 1931 (and which left 30 dead) broke relations between the CNT and the Republicans. From then on there was open confrontation between the government and the anarchists. Attempts to establish libertarian communism multiplied without there being any real coordination at a national level. An example of this was the anarchist insurrection that took place in January 1932 in Alto Llobregat (Catalonia), where the miners took control of the town of Fígols and proclaimed “libertarian communism” for a week. The strike spread to other towns such as Berga, Gironella, Sallent, Balsareny, Navarcles and Súria, where mining activity came to a standstill and shops were closed. The repression was fierce. On January 21st, the government sent the army to take these mining towns. Figols was the only town still in the hands of the insurgents on the 23rd, but on the 24th it fell and the workers were arrested and expelled from the mines. The Republic was also responsible for the repression of the town of Casas Viejas (province of Cádiz), which in 1933 had declared libertarian communism and where five peasants were massacred.

3) Internal polarization of the CNT

Although in 1931 the FAI won the favor of a group of reformist anarcho-syndicalists within the CNT (the Trentists), revolution was impossible. This group signed a manifesto calling for collaboration with other trade unions and left-wing forces in general, and some went on to create the Syndicalist Party, which advocated parliamentarism and contributed two ministers to the republican government in 1936. In the FAI, which also had ministers, there was also a clear division between the supporters of a “municipalist anarchism” (based on the municipality) and the syndicalists, who called for a “constructive anarchism” compatible with industrial growth.

4) The Asturias Revolution, 1934

The revolt that took place in the mining areas of Asturias in 1934 was a harbinger of the social revolution of 1936 (and the civil war). Known as the Revolution of October, these events were the consequence of the accumulation, over several years, of forces of the Asturian mining and industrial proletariat through continuous local conflicts. In 1934, the revolutionary impulse in Asturias was so great that it swept along all the workers’ organizations, which until then had been in conflict or divided, and forced them to sign the Workers’ Alliance.

The annihilation of the revolt was led by General Francisco Franco, who directed the military operations from Madrid and, after a week of fighting, managed to overcome the miners’ resistance. The captured insurgents were subjected to severe torture, rape, mutilation and mass executions. Approximately 2,000 people died. The extraordinary resistance of the workers to the 1936 military coup was largely inspired by the example of the Asturian miners, who showed that it was possible to resist and, why not, win on that occasion.

III – The background

Anarcho-syndicalism was, in effect, the catalyst for this fierce class struggle of the then recently formed Spanish proletariat against the traditional clergy and a booming capitalism that sought cheap labor and caused the overcrowding of peasants in the cities. However, the full force of Spanish anarchism cannot be understood without the element that sustains it, the underlying substratum, the mesh of a parallel society formed by close ties that prefigured a new world in tension with bourgeois society. The CNT was not limited to the factory and generated symbiosis with the revolutionary effervescence^5. in the neighborhoods and among the emigrants of the south, where neighboring families sought a means of subsistence, often selling their labor and in close contact with the surrounding peasants. Other people formed cooperatives in the areas of work, housing, and food to meet their immediate needs. These organizations were also places of learning and the seeds of structures that prefigured a self-managed society.

From the 1930s onwards, and especially in 1936, the feminists, grouped together in Free Women, grew considerably and in 1936 numbered more than 200 groups and 25,000 members.

However, libertarian culture played a role in all aspects of life in favor of these struggles against domination and exploitation in the countryside, factories, workshops and neighborhoods — which were echoed by self-managed alternatives —: that of a collective complicity with meaning. There are three essential cultural facets that stand out for the impact they had on this libertarian world.

1) Workers’ athenaeums

Throughout the first four decades of the 20th century, libertarian and popular athenaeums multiplied, as well as other types of popular universities for working class people of any age, who acquired there the cultural education that had been denied them as such. The rationalist impulse of liberation through culture gave these centers sufficient strength and legitimacy in the eyes of the working class, which treated the athenaeums and public libraries with veneration. The athenaeums also served as meeting places for neighborhood residents, where people debated, got to know each other, established strong bonds and discussed their problems. Furthermore, many women who sold their labor found for the first time a place where they were on equal terms with men, where they could get an education and where they came into contact with anarchism. The libertarian athenaeums were clearly successful and it can be said that they replaced, to their own advantage, the State and the religious orders in the educational function of their time.

The publication of newsletters, the publication of books and pamphlets, and the organization of field trips, lectures and talks, theater performances, poetry recitals, debates, Esperanto courses and free libraries were some of the activities of the popular athenaeums, generally self-financed by the users. Great importance was attached to hygiene as a means of preventing disease and to knowledge of contraception and sexuality.

2) Rationalist schools

Co-educational rationalist schools were set up, often on the initiative of these athenaeums and thanks to anarcho-syndicalist influence. These schools, aimed at the children of workers, used the most advanced pedagogical methods based on the proposals of Francisco Ferrer y Guardia. The aim was for the children of the workers to acquire the maximum amount of theoretical, practical and artistic knowledge without any dogmatic or ideological spirit. The main aim was to stimulate empathy, aesthetics and the desire to learn, so that each and every one of them could fulfill themselves in all aspects of their personal and social life.

3) Libertarian naturism

Through the condemnation of the ravages of modern life in cities, pollution and the working and housing conditions of working class families, the relationship between anarchism and naturism (a precursor of ecology, organic farming and natural care) has always been very present in Spain. This link was very important at the end of the 1920s, during the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera. The magazine Helios (1916-1939) initially played an important catalytic role, and the anarchist group Sol y Vida (Sun and Life) later contributed to its dissemination by organizing numerous excursions to the countryside and the sea for naturist purposes.

Thanks to this counterculture, the working classes throughout Spain became imbued with a historical consciousness and a strong sense of dignity. Only this clear awareness could challenge all forms of domination, which led to the creation of the anarchist-inspired feminist movement Mujeres Libres (Free Women) in April 1936. Anarchism was transmitted through the ethics it displayed in everyday life and the meaning it gave to its struggle for a common project of emancipation: libertarian communism and a free, fraternal and beautiful world, finally liberated from the domination of capitalism and its death drive.

IV – War and revolution imminent

1) The fourth national congress of the CNT (May 1936)

At this congress, held in Zaragoza with an openly revolutionary tone, a warning was given of the imminence of a military coup and a call was made for immediate organization in the face of the possible outbreak of a world conflict. In addition, the CNT reunified and reinstated the representatives of its reformist current, the “Treintistas”, while contemplating the possibility of establishing national pacts with the UGT. The failure of several insurrection attempts instigated since 1933 by the so-called “Fauists” contributed to this.

The Confederation considered the “failure of parliamentarism” to be clear and reaffirmed its “apolitical principles”. Taking up the federal concept of libertarian communism, its revolutionary program was summed up in the socialization of the private ownership of the means of production and the distribution of the social product according to the slogan “From each according to his or her strength, to each according to his or her needs”. The text of the motion attempted to reconcile an internal opposition based on the almost inherent disagreement that arose in Spanish anarchism and which also implied two ways of defeating capitalism: one from the territory and everyday life, the neighborhood and the rural municipality (communalism), and the other from the workplace (syndicalism).

2) The Popular Front

As the February 1936 elections approached, the CNT, contrary to its usual practice, did not campaign in favor of abstention. The justification was that it was necessary to get rid of a right-wing government that prevented the unions from acting, and that all the political prisoners (some 30,000 people) could be released from jail. The Republicans and the Socialists stood in coalition in the municipal elections of February 16, 1936.

V – War and Revolution in Spain, 1936-1939

The rebellion of the Spanish masses was not a struggle to improve their living conditions within the framework of an admired capitalist system, but a struggle against the first manifestations of a hated capitalism. (…) Whatever concessions have been made in recent decades to the needs of industrial progress, the Spanish worker has never resigned himself, like his English and German colleagues, to being a mere employee of industry. (…) For me, this is the key to the privileged position of anarchism in Spain. Franz Borkenau El reñidero español, 1937 [own translation].

1) The State and the people in the face of the coup d’état

Thanks to information obtained by its spy network, the CNT had warned the government months before that a military uprising was being prepared in Morocco. Despite this, the government, led by Casares Quiroga, refused to arm the workers for fear of a revolution. The uprising, which had the support of the Church, took place on July 18 in almost all of Spain. The republican government responded very timidly and reactively, and provoked a revolutionary situation. Thanks to the long and patient preparation and the good internal organization of the CNT and the action groups, the military sedition was repressed in record time in a large part of the Spanish territory. Thus, on July 19, for the first time in history, the people alone and almost unarmed managed to defeat the army, especially in Catalonia⁶. Surprised by such popular resistance, the military imposed their dictatorship in the conquered territories and remained at war against the republican zone for almost three years.

2) Countercurrents to the rebels

Is it inevitable that war will devour revolution? Due to the popular resistance it encountered, the military coup sponsored by Capital, the bourgeoisie and the clergy, led to civil war. The extermination was not directed against bourgeois democracy, but from the outset it was aimed at destroying a proletariat whose revolutionary capacity, unprecedented anywhere in the world, threatened the interests of these groups and could go beyond the geographical limits of Spain. Hence the international consensus, with the exception of Mexico, that no aid should be given to the republic in danger except, as the USSR did, to take over.

A – Revolutionary impulse and popular creativity

In the Republican zone, slogans were not necessary once the military was defeated in its first attempt to seize power. The following day, columns of armed militiamen set off to the front to confront the military. From July 19th onwards, a popular wave took over the barracks and churches, which were emptied, sometimes by fire, and converted into food depots or schools. For themselves and by themselves, the workers took over the factories, the mines, the means of transport, the agricultural properties, the public services and the shops, without any preconceived or standardized scheme⁷. In fact, it was the birth of a popular culture, an intergenerational apprenticeship in self-management internalized during sixty years of struggle and social alternatives. Very soon, from Andalusia to Catalonia, passing through Levante, Castile and Extremadura, the self-managed collectives completely revised working conditions such as, for example, the retirement pension granted to men and women over 60 years of age. Workplaces often incorporated activities that were unusual in these places, such as the setting up of schools, nurseries or athenaeums (true schools of popular education). The revolutionary committees were responsible for supplying the cities, towns and countryside, as well as the combatants who had enlisted at the front. Popular activity and initiatives overflowed and aid was provided to refugees fleeing the rebel zone and to part of the Republican zone itself after, for example, the losses of Malaga and, little by little, of the Cantabrian coast.

The ethics of a new self-managed society were being established. Despite the departure to the front of thousands of the most committed workers, the prevailing confidence and enthusiasm intensified production and creative capacity^8. The example of three different regions will allow us to glimpse this popular capacity both to defend the achievements of the victory against the putschists and to invent a new world in evolution according to the territorial, sociological and political characteristics of each place.

a) In Aragon

The collapse of the state institutions, the flight of the rich landowners from a predominantly agricultural region and the protection of the columns of anarchist fighters by militiamen positioned along the entire front line were factors that favored the implementation, for the first time in history, of the communist libertarian project on a large scale.

Just a few days after the popular victory, thousands of villages were constituted as free and federated communes. Thus — as a preliminary phase of a communalism conceived for more than 50 years and long awaited — the communes, the unions and the committees controlled both the means of production and the egalitarian redistribution of the harvests according to need. In this momentum, the union lost its central role and the municipal boundaries were surpassed by the spontaneous creation of collective entities⁹ by the peasants. By federating these, the Council of Aragon and the Federation of Collectivities ensured their coordination and mutual aid between those who were naturally more favored and those who were not so favored. In some, the money was kept, and in others it was abolished and replaced by vouchers that made it possible to cover needs. Production first covered the needs of the members of the collectives and was then exchanged or sold to acquire the missing items, but it also served to meet the needs of the militias at the front.

b) In the Levante region

Collectivization was more difficult from the outset and could not be carried out as quickly as in Aragon. As in the other regions of Spain, the Republican authorities retained power through the use of assault troops, the carabineros and the military. Another difficulty was that the size of the villages, which were more like small towns, made it difficult to obtain the unanimous support of the population: the political and social divisions were more pronounced and the different tendencies were better organized. On the other hand, their proximity facilitated the practices of solidarity among peasants already structured by the regional federation of the CNT since its creation and even before. This framework quickly served as a basis for the creation of the parallel federation of agrarian collectives, which covered five provinces (Castellón, Valencia, Alicante, Murcia and Albacete). The importance of agriculture in the first four — all in the Mediterranean region and among the richest in Spain — and the population density (almost 3,300,000 inhabitants) conferred great significance on the social achievements that followed.

Thanks to the natural wealth and the creative spirit of its members, socialization acquired a more decisive and accelerated rhythm from the beginning in the province of Valencia. In 43% of the localities in the richest region of Spain, 500 agricultural collectives were created within a period of 20 months. Inter-municipal work encouraged the establishment of local rice, orange and horticultural commissions, which were coordinated by the federation. A centre was set up to combat pests and for sulphation work, tree pruning and work in the fields and orchards. Another commission was dedicated to road repair and construction. All of this facilitated, based on a general plan, the synchronization of efforts and their necessary rationalization. Three quarters of the rice harvest and half of the orange production —almost four million quintals— fell to the Levante Peasant Federation, and after satisfying local needs, 70% of the total harvest was transported and sold through the commercial organization and the numerous warehouses, trucks and ships at the Federation’s disposal, and its export department which, at the beginning of 1938, had set up sales outlets in France (Marseille, Perpignan, Bordeaux, Sète, Cherbourg and Paris). The collectives sent their surplus products to their federations, where they were counted, classified and stored, and the corresponding quantities were sent to the different sections of the Regional Committee of Valencia; thus, the federation always knew exactly what reserves it had available for bartering, exporting and distribution.

The communities of Levante, like those of Aragon, Castile, Andalusia and Extremadura, eradicated illiteracy, which initially stood at 70%. The Regional Federation of Levante created a university in the middle of orange groves and fields and made it available to the National Federation of Spanish Peasants to teach agriculture and livestock farming, as well as general culture.

On the other hand, the spirit of solidarity of the municipalities of Valencia was as great as that of Aragon and it took in a large number of refugees, women and children from Castile. For example, the communities supplied Madrid, part of the Central Front and the southern part of the Aragon Front with free supplies. Six collectives from the Gandía region delivered 187 truckloads of food in the first six months of the war, and another 7 were sent to Almeria, to a center for refugees who were malnourished.

c) In Catalonia

As in Aragon, the State was also annihilated in Catalonia, where most of the owners of large companies fled. The bourgeoisie and the State regaining power unleashed a festive revolutionary turmoil that took over the streets and changed the very face of Barcelona. Capitalism disappeared¹⁰. From a political point of view, and with the State in collapse, rather than a duality of power there was an atomization of power¹¹. In fact, and despite the ancestral rejection produced by the term “political”, the seed of new popular political institutions was really formed, based on decision-making assemblies commissioned by and for the people. Drawing on previous experiences, a whole network of new committees was created, richer and more complex than in the past. These coordinated committees looted shops and buildings in the bourgeois neighborhoods and rehoused the population of the slums. The committees, which were heavily armed, destroyed or repurposed churches and prisons, neutralized the free market and reorganized collective life based on the places of life. In this way, they secured supplies and began to organize production according to real needs and not according to the now abolished free market. An example of this is the creation of the agricultural collective of Barcelona and its surroundings, which for almost three years directly covered 90% of the city’s vegetable needs. From the early 1930s, the CNT agricultural workers of the city of Barcelona had joined together in the Sindicato Único de Campesinos de Barcelona (Single Union of Farmers of Barcelona), from which the Colectividad Agrícola de Barcelona (Agricultural Collective of Barcelona) and its radio were born in the early days of the revolution. The organizations of the different neighborhoods of Barcelona appointed a central committee, advised by neighborhood commissions made up of workers and former businessmen. Each neighborhood was divided into zones which in turn were distributed into groups, made up of about 25 workers and a technical delegate. They immediately began to cultivate, first the fields and orchards they had already been working on, and then the abandoned lands and those of the convents and large landowners seized in the region. The Barcelona Collective, integrated into the peasant section of the CNT’s Union of Agricultural, Fishing and Food Industries, was responsible for the distribution and direct sale of its products in the 105 retail outlets it had in the city’s 16 covered retail markets and 2 wholesale markets. Eliminating the middlemen in order to obtain better prices allowed it to deliver 15% of the vegetables to hospitals and the military quartermaster, 30% to the population of the Collectivity and the remaining 55% to the city’s markets^12.

B – Against the revolutionary impulse, self-repression

It was, however, in Catalonia — a strong and emblematic place of the revolution in the basic areas of politics, society and the economy — where the CNT itself paradoxically counteracted this embryonic power, which had just been spontaneously constituted. Immediately after the armed victory, the most powerful libertarian organization in the world, which in those days had acquired enormous revolutionary potential and had just defended an inflexible anti-state position, ended up renouncing its own demands. In a plenary session held on July 21, 1936, in a hurry and without following horizontal organic procedures, some prominent leaders of the CNT managed to get this organization to officially renounce libertarian communism in the name of an anti-fascist front of “leftist” forces and so as not to scare away the “democratic” powers that could come to the rescue of the Republic. Even though Companys, president of the Generalitat¹³, declared himself willing to capitulate to this overwhelming revolutionary force, the CNT resurrected the Catalan state from its ashes by joining the Central Committee of Anti-Fascist Militias of Catalonia (CCMA¹⁴. The CMMA acted as a buffer and mediator between the countless revolutionary committees and the collapsed capitalist state apparatus, and therefore as a springboard for the restoration of the latter. This entity was dissolved on October 1, 1936, and the CNT entered with three ministers in the government of the Generalitat, which had just been renamed the Council of the Generalitat due to the rejection that the word “government” generated in the confederation.

Catalonia, beacon of the revolution, thus opened the door to the participation of the CNT in the central state, as demanded by its secretary general, Horacio Prieto. Horacio Prieto, who was in favor of the CNT being represented in Largo Caballero’s government, set about convincing the rest of the union in the name of defending the achievements of the revolution. On November 6, four CNT ministers took up their posts in the central government.

Throughout this war against the putschists, from July 21st onwards, the CNT ministers who were in the Catalan government and, by November 1936, in Madrid played the role that the bourgeoisie expected of them and that only they could assume. The objective was, in the first place, to slow down the dynamics of the unfolding and consummation of libertarian communism and, secondly, to overcome the resistance of the workers through a covert return to capitalist normality or, in other words, to ensure the end of the spontaneous expropriations that began in July 1936 by forcing their channeling and domestication.

This dual operation resulted in a process of [gradual] integration into the governmental machinery of all the revolutionary institutions¹⁵ through successive governmental decrees. For example, on October 24, 1936, the Generalitat issued two decrees that, at least officially, confirmed the power of the State over the revolution. The first decree dissolved the revolutionary committees dominated by CNT affiliates, replacing them with municipal councils whose members were appointed by all the parties of the Popular Front and not elected by direct democracy. The second decree “legalized” revolutionary collectivizations at least in Catalonia, which in practice reinforced the power of the Generalitat over the economy. Contributing to the deterioration of the situation, the leaders of the CNT even praised the merits of the Decree of Collectivization. Another decree stipulated that, as of November 1, the workers’ militia of revolutionary volunteers would be transformed into a classic bourgeois army, subject to the monarchic code of military justice and directed by the Generalitat.

Although they tried to organize themselves by linking directly with each other (urban and rural), the collectives were unable to break the straitjacket imposed by the unions, which were framed by and within the law. As soon as the government cut off foreign funding or foreign currency, all the rebellious or anti-establishment collectivized enterprises were irretrievably subdued, since they could no longer pay wages or buy raw materials. From then on, political power, as well as that of production or defense, no longer emanated directly from the real needs of the inhabitants of the neighborhoods — expressed through their committees, which were disarmed — nor did it obey those needs. The union, as a tool of struggle and emancipation, turned against the revolution and became an apparatus for the control of workers and the economy, at the service of the state and the bourgeoisie. The free market — and even competition between self-managed companies controlled by the unions themselves — began to direct production¹⁶ and this distortion of the revolution, the loss of power in their factories, undermined the morale of the workers. Thus, arms production was affected by the prevailing demoralization until it affected the morale of the combatants at the front in two ways, both due to the lack of arms and ammunition and the diminishing revolutionary prospects.

Faced with this demoralization, which sometimes resulted in acts of passive resistance or even desertions, the official CNT and the UGT launched campaigns to raise morale and exhort people to work and to do their duty. The war was already in a position to devour the revolution.

VI – May 1937, the counter-revolution in all its forms

1) Revolutionaries trapped

This progressive and patient empowerment of the revolution, and the legislative offensive that transformed collectivizations into the planned union capitalism of the Generalitat, was not an automatic process. Thus, within the CNT, the radical membership challenged the collaborationist membership and won the support of the majority of trade unionists. However, this position was almost always in the minority in factory assemblies for two reasons: one of them was the avalanche of opportunistic affiliations after July 19th, when incorporation even became obligatory; on the other hand, the recruitment of the most committed and conscious militants to go to the front caused a drain on the most determined, capable and convinced militants.

In this context, the Unified Party of Catalonia (PSUC)¹⁷ —under Stalin’s orders—which was insignificant at the beginning, gradually made its mark and imposed its control over the state apparatus. To do this, it relied on the petty bourgeoisie, which it favored from the beginning. This party also grew considerably among the “rabassaires” (landlords), sharecroppers and small local landowners, and, by the end of 1937, had some 10,000 Catalan peasant members (a quarter of the party’s total). To coordinate the counter-revolutionary efforts of its followers, the PSUC also created a conservative pressure group made up of 18,000 shopkeepers and small traders who demanded the return of the free market. Its social base made it a rather peculiar communist party in which there were practically no workers, most of them affiliated to the CNT or the UGT. The middle classes and other intermediate strata were, therefore, the only option for the growth of the Catalan communist party. In practice, however, the PSUC was also strengthened thanks to the unconfessed and unconfessable help of the anarchist ministers. In addition to supporting successive government decrees, due to a lack of strategic vision, the anarchist ministers stood by and did nothing when the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM)¹⁸ , their only potential ally, was expelled in December 1936. And, without a doubt, they accepted it in exchange for greater representation of the CNT-FAI in the government. Clearly satisfied with the greater power they had achieved in this body, the anarchist ministers did not realize that, with the subsequent remodeling of the Generalitat, the PSUC would come to control food distribution and public order. By January 1937, the policy of bread distribution was clearly polarized. The POUM rightly blamed the food shortages and bread queues on the government’s free market policy, which encouraged speculation. In response, the PSUC blamed the revolution for the hunger problem, attributing the food shortages to the multiplicity of revolutionary committees and the activities of armed workers’ groups, and called for greater government control. In February, the Stalinists campaigned for a “single authority” and organized a police demonstration against the control patrols, repressing their supporters and limiting the number of weapons on the front¹⁹ . In the first months of 1937, tensions rose sharply and a series of violent clashes took place between the forces of the reorganized state and the scattered revolutionary powers. Throughout Spain, which was still Republican, the revolutionaries had to fight on two fronts, trapped between external and internal enemies. On the one hand, there was a fascism financed by the Church and aided on the ground by the Axis powers (Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy), and on the other, the Communist Party armed by Stalin and under his orders.

2) The revolutionary rise

The conversion of the Popular Militias into an army, decreed in October 1936, provoked strong reactions among the anarchists on the front. The Militarization Decree had been hotly debated in the Durruti column, which decided not to accept it because it did not improve the combat conditions of the 19th of July volunteer militiamen nor did it resolve the chronic lack of weapons. In a letter addressed to the Generalitat, Durruti denied the need for barracks discipline, countering it with the superiority of revolutionary discipline: “Militiamen yes; soldiers never”.

On November 4, 1936, the day the press announced that four anarchists had been sworn in as ministers in the Madrid government, Durruti gave a long-awaited speech on the CNT-FAI radio that was broadcast throughout Spain.

The following extract from the speech, which lasted several hours, is very revealing: If the militarization decreed by the Generalitat is to frighten us and impose iron discipline on us, they have made a mistake. You are wrong, councillors, with the decree of militarization of the militias. Since you speak of iron discipline, I say come with me to the front. There we are, those of us who accept no discipline, because we are conscious of our duty. And you will see our order and our organization. Then we will come to Barcelona and ask you about your discipline, your order and your control, which you do not have.

This speech touched the hearts of each of the thousands of militiamen who had gone to the front in a great revolutionary impulse: they were not fighting for the republic or bourgeois democracy, but for the triumph of the social revolution and the emancipation of the proletariat.

Taking into account his charisma and the impact of his words on the people, Durruti’s declaration—addressed to his class brothers—had a very good chance of provoking the hatred of the enemies of the revolution, in all its variants. For him it was the announcement of his death, which occurred on the Madrid front on November 20, 1936, and was turned into a mystery by a posthumous deification. In this sense, and in an almost sarcastic gesture, Durruti was even promoted to lieutenant colonel of the Popular Army.

After overcoming an attempt at armed confrontation with other sister forces, supporters of militarization, a part of the column decided to abandon the front (in February 1937) and head for Barcelona, taking their weapons with them. In Catalonia, the revolutionary opposition organized itself on the basis of the discontent of the population of Barcelona, which had increased as a result of inflation, which doubled the cost of some basic foods in six months of civil war and affected above all the poorest inhabitants of the city. This inflation was the result of the hoarding of crops to raise prices by the small capitalists organized within the PSUC. Faced with the rupture between the urban and rural economies, some groups of armed workers and members of the control patrols, breaking away from the control of the Superior Committees of the CNT, began to requisition the crops in the countryside and allied themselves with these militiamen of the Durruti column. Fighting together for the socialization of companies and determined to confront the counter-revolution, in March 1937 they founded “The Friends of Durruti”, a group that also advocated for proletarian control of the army and the police, the abolition of the State Security Corps and the bourgeois parliaments, in which the anarchists were always represented. The Friends of Durruti were the main promoters and participants in the May Days of 1937.

3) May 1937 in Barcelona

Despite its plea for a “second revolution”, the revolutionary opposition was now no more than a defensive movement, but one determined to stop the assault of the republican state against the power of the local committees and workers’ patrols. However, even as such, the revolutionary opposition constituted a direct challenge to the reconstruction of state power that had grown up in the shadow of the revolution and was now in a position of strength to exercise its historical right to a monopoly of armed force.

On March 3rd, a decree from the Generalitat aimed at dissolving all local revolutionary committees, disarming the workers’ patrols and entrusting control of the French border to state forces, provoked the resignation of the anarchist ministers. After this appearance of opposition, they returned on the 27th and the decree was approved with their agreement.

Then, when the tension between the opposing forces reached its peak, clashes broke out between the police and the workers. The Generalitat banned the May Day celebrations on the grounds that there was too much tension in Barcelona. Taking into account the strength of the working-class tradition in the city, this decision could only be interpreted as a provocation on the part of the government, and two days later, on May 3, 1937, the “May events” broke out in Barcelona.

The defeat of the May Days of 1937, caused by the ceasefire ordered by the leaders of the CNT, confirmed the armed victory that the counter-revolution, led by the Stalinists, needed. In early June they dissolved the Control Patrols and at the end of September, manu militari, all the neighbourhood defence committees. The ideology of anti-fascist unity, which united the Generalitat government, the Stalinists, the Republicans and the higher committees with the sole objective of winning the war and crushing the revolution, imposed a ferocious repression of the anarcho-syndicalist movement and the POUM^{. 20}

4) The attack on the collectivities

In June 1937, to everyone’s surprise, Uribe — the communist minister of agriculture who until then had always openly supported the conservatives and reactionaries in the interior of the country — issued a decree legalizing the collectives throughout Spanish territory, regardless of the circumstances that had given rise to them. However, he did so only to get rid of them. Immediately, several teams of young communists went to Catalonia and Levante to help the peasants with the harvest, but these shock brigades had only one objective: to infiltrate the agricultural organizations, take them over and destroy them.

In mid-June, the large-scale attack began in Aragon, using methods hitherto unknown. The Stalinist general Líster led the direct attack in which 30% of the collectives were destroyed. Arrests and looting took place everywhere. Numerous grain stores and cooperatives were also ransacked, street furniture was destroyed and in the region of Valencia real battles were fought in which the army used tanks.

5) The war devours the revolution and the republic

Between October and December 1937, the defense committees also published a newspaper that advocated solidarity with revolutionary prisoners and attacked collaborationism. From June 1937 until the end of the war, the Stalinist state practised persecution, torture and physical annihilation, forcing the radical sector of the CNT, the Trotskyists and the POUM into hiding²¹.

State anarchism, for its part, consolidated its collaboration with the republican bourgeoisie, appropriated the victory over fascism, repressed any revolutionary danger in its ranks and assumed the tasks proper to any bureaucracy that sought to integrate itself into the apparatus of a state that imposed the militarization of work and life, very strict rationing and a war economy. By 1938, many revolutionaries had been killed, were in prison or were in the most absolute secrecy. It was not Franco’s dictatorship, but Negrin’s republic, that ended the revolution and dug its own grave and that of the anti-fascists.

VII – balance / lessons: take it (and learn) or leave it

Of course, it is much easier to make a critical analysis of the facts outside the context of the period in question, when the war was raging on all sides. Hindsight makes it easier for us to understand and gives us the opportunity to pay unreserved tribute to the most lucid revolutionaries of a time that was exceptional in many respects. This critical analysis allows us to immerse ourselves in the experience of this great movement, contextualizing it, and to take the relevant elements to chart our path to emancipation.

The revolutionary victory:

In July 1936, the workers knew how to act without their bosses and proceeded to expropriate the bourgeoisie and suppress some fundamental elements of capitalism (the armed state, the church and the police). But, in addition, at the beginning they also overtook their own political and union organizations.
These social, economic, political and cultural conquests were perfectly in line with the anarcho-syndicalist ideology which, although impregnated with a tactical political spirit of struggle, despised the field of politics and even neglected the question of taking power²² .

In the political sphere:

These conquests were not aimed at taking power, but at carrying out social revolution by destroying the army, abolishing the power of the Church and taking control of the factories. The driving force behind the revolutionary factory and local committees was the self-organization of the working class in the heat of the revolutionary situation, which tacitly constituted the germ of the organs of power of the revolutionary proletariat.
Their weakness was their inability to coordinate with each other to impose their own power and undermine that of the State. What was lacking was a revolutionary organization capable of transforming these committees into an effective people’s power, with assemblies that elected their delegates in direct democracy, with the possibility of dismissing them at any time, and with the capacity for coordination at the regional and national levels. With the political parties neutralized, the CNT, as a union and a tool for the struggle against capitalism, could have withdrawn to make way for the new revolutionary political institutions that were emerging, federated regionally and confederated at the other levels.
Furthermore, many of these committees, strongly influenced by the ideology of anti-fascist unity, quickly became anti-fascist committees, composed of workers and bourgeoisie, instrumental to the program of the petty bourgeoisie. Due to the war and the danger, the workers did not know how to act against their bosses, they respected the state apparatus and its officials, and in May 1937 they accepted — under duress and reluctantly — the capitulation to their class enemy: the bourgeoisie.
Given their theoretical incapacity due to the lack of their own political program and the corresponding strategy, the anarchists, despite their discourse against the State, never raised the question of power, which they left in the hands of the professional politicians of the republican bourgeoisie and the socialists and even shared it with them when their participation was necessary to close the way to a revolutionary alternative, in the name of anti-fascism.
Thus, the entry of anarchist and Poumist ministers into the government of the Generalitat, and later into that of Madrid, made possible the dissolution of the local committees in October 1936 — without the slightest armed resistance — to make way for the anti-fascist municipalities. The defense and factory committees, and some local committees, resisted their definitive dissolution, although they only managed to delay it.
In this way, the civil war became a war between two factions of the bourgeoisie — the fascists on one side and the democratic republicans on the other — but one in which the people had already been defeated.
However, the essence of anti-fascism²³ is to promote the fight against fascism by strengthening democracy. Therefore, anti-fascism does not wage a struggle against capitalism itself, but only against one of the many circumstantial forms that this capitalism takes.

In the economic sphere:

The generic term collectivization, often mythologized, went through four stages in practice:

A- The workers’ takeover, from July to September 1936.

B- The adaptation of the seizures to the Decree of Collectivities, that is to say their state recovery, from October to December 1936, without questioning, alternatives or slogans on the part of the official CNT. Thus, the Decree, by appropriating the name, turned collectivization into union capitalism.

C- The Generalitat’s struggle to direct the economy and control the collectives, in the face of the attempt to socialize the economy promoted by the radical sector of the CNT militancy, from January to May 1937.

D- Progressive interventionism and state centralization of the central government imposed a war economy and the militarization of labor from June 1937 to January 1939.

VIII – In conclusion:

The Friends of Durruti presented the most coherent and lucid pragmatic proposals from a theoretical point of view for carrying out the revolution, insisting on its totalizing character since it had to take place at the same time in all areas: political, defense, economic, social, cultural…, and this in all countries, transcending all national borders.

In a non-industrialized context, less conditioned peasants demonstrated a social conscience and a creative capacity far superior to that of urban workers, both in the political sphere and in that of socialization, inventiveness and transformation in general. With the socialization of the means of production, the development of production and consumption as local and territorial as possible, and the abolition of money in many cases, the collectivities took a big step towards the abolition of value and of work, that is, the abolition of the essential categories of Capitalism. However, this attempt was doomed to failure if it did not spread like wildfire throughout the country and also on a global scale. What remained overall was the decentralization of cities and industrial production, as theorized by the secretary of the CNT intellectuals, thus foreshadowing and anticipating the proposals of social ecology²⁴. Once the revolution was defeated, all these hopes were dashed, although they were not completely lost since history allows us to recover them.

IX – For a communalist strategy here and now

“Know your enemy and, above all, know yourself, and you will be invincible.” Sun Tzu The Art of War

Much time has passed since then, and capitalism has undergone many changes in order to continue its mad race towards greater value. One of its main victories has been the deactivation, or rather the bracketing, of its first contradiction, that between the divided communities dispossessed of their means of production and those who have absorbed that production. This long and hard war between the proletariat and capital has, for the moment, been won by the latter²⁵ by integrating the proletarian community into its logic of consumption, a logic that leads to the society of the spectacle, to social separation and atomization, and also to ecological devastation. It is these latter effects that give us the measure of the ultimate contradictions of capitalism, those of a war against life itself.

This is a great challenge, precisely at a time when technology confuses, blinds and controls us to the point that we resign ourselves to a destruction programmed by the very dynamics of the system; and, knowing that this system, driven solely by the economy — often tinged with a paradoxical humanism or a shoddy ecology — cannot but adhere to the motto imprinted in its genes, “grow or die”, the awakening of consciousness is fundamental to deciding to win this declared war. Furthermore, no movement with a future projection, and even less so a revolutionary movement, can ignore its past. An African proverb says: ‘If you don’t know where to go, look behind you’. This humility gives us a measure of what we can learn from the war and revolution in Spain, from fascism and the truncated responses of antifascism. And also, and above all, about the development of this libertarian movement and its unparalleled momentum, fueled as it was by a dialectic between three inseparable elements: practice, theory and dreams. An entire strategy developed not by notorious intellectuals but by a collective intelligence developed emotionally in the heat of action, in collective struggles and alternative realizations, in close complicity for a common objective: libertarian communism.

Another important element to take up from our Spanish elders, in the here and now of a constituted movement, is not to wait for a revolution to break out in order to make it. It is about starting to build now, flexible but solid institutions, as the embryo of the new world. This historical fact nourishes the essential political proposal of Murray Bookchin’s communalism, which will determine the very essence of the communalist strategy: “The tension between confederations and the state must remain clear and uncompromising… libertarian municipalism is formed in a struggle against the state, it is strengthened and even defined by this opposition”. And this until we achieve a balance of power that is favorable to us.

In our current geopolitical context, the political and social question cannot be dissociated from the ecological question. It asserts itself on the margins, through practices, in restricted territories, in communes and everywhere human groups try to regain control of their lives (housing, peasant agriculture, health, production of energy and basic necessities, artistic life, etc.). No alternative project will be truly successful without the development of a movement that brings together the struggles against domination and for dignity, as well as the concrete alternatives consciously sought outside the logic of capitalism. It is necessary to multiply the exchanges between these spaces, to create bonds of solidarity and to anchor them in and between communities, regions and internationally. Armed with this communalist culture and practice, the numerous ongoing experiences of social pedagogy, alternative education, popular education, shared housing and spaces, self-managed production, collective farms, anti-patriarchal and feminist struggles, struggles against digital technology, active solidarity with migrants and ZADs, can contribute to enriching this political dynamic which, starting from the local level, must federate across a territory and confederate beyond it.

Three recent events provide us with fundamental elements for developing a concrete and relevant strategy. The first is undoubtedly the pandemic, which has directly made a large number of people aware of their dependence on supermarkets and the world market for our food and healthcare. This blatant demonstration of our lack of food self-sufficiency has enabled many people to see things more clearly. Closer to home, and still on the same theme, the “Soulèvements de la terre” (uprisings of the earth) in France showed us the way, the determination of a movement to denounce the grabbing of water by agribusiness, mobilizing forces to achieve victories. Closer to home, the mobilization of farmers across Europe denounces the accelerated globalization of the agricultural market through free trade agreements, in this case Mercosur, which sacrifices small farmers and deprives us of any food autonomy. We are at a point where the process that began with enclosures, that process of dividing or consolidating common fields, meadows, pastures and other farmland in England, reaching all of Western Europe, is coming to an end, that is to say, our farmers are disappearing, both in the North and in the South, turning the land into a world/factory, into a synthetic and contaminated world. This growing awareness that we are at the mercy of this increasingly fragile food resource machine shows us the way forward, for us to unite, both those of us already in the struggle and those of us creating alternatives.

Based on these social movements, class struggles, struggles for dignity against all forms of domination and exploitation, we want to stop delegating our political power and take it directly within our popular and decision-making assemblies. This is a process that should involve all urban and rural collectives united in the struggle against domination and capitalism, to create and anchor our own community self-institutions in tension with that of the State. The world of tomorrow is being built today. It is in these assemblies, in the complicity of thinking and doing together with empathy and in the perspective of a new world, where we will be able to determine together our real food needs, thinking of the most disadvantaged and in close collaboration and participation with small farmers, with the aim of repopulating the countryside emptied of its inhabitants. It is about a joint creation of politics²⁶ as a strong link within our diversities and inserted in the natural environment. But it is also a conscious and voluntary movement towards a definitive exit from capitalism and towards a social ecology. At this moment, and in the face of these vital mobilizations that concern us all, we need to align our strategy with this desire to recover food autonomy²⁷ , an essential ally of political autonomy.

What forces do we have at our disposal? Not potentially, but really? We have to admit that the balance of power is far from being in our favor, due to the lack of support for our proposals and, above all, to the lack of organization. And therein lies the problem, and it is this deficiency that our strategy must first and foremost address. So, if we manage to get started and give this first push, we will have taken the first step, undoubtedly the most difficult one. It is up to all of us to develop this collective intelligence, in constant and determined dialogue, to create this emancipatory and federating movement capable of raising the flight of hope, at the local, regional and beyond level.

Floreal M. Romero

Translated into Spanish by Camino Villanueva, many thanks to her.

Four inspiring books on Spanish anarchism:

Los caminos del comunismo libertario en España 1868-1937 : https://fal.cnt.es/producto/los-caminos-del-comunismo-libertario-en-espana-1868-1937/
Barricades in Barcelona Agustín Guillamón Espartaco Internacional, 2007
Libertarian Spain: Gaston Leval: https://www.todoporhacer.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Gast%C3%B3n-Leval.-Colectividades-libertarias-en-Espa%C3%B1a.pdf
The Spanish Anarchists The Heroic Years 1868-1936 Murray Bookchin Ed Virus View: https://viruseditorial.net/libreria/los-anarquistas-espanoles/

Notes :

Jérôme Baschet in Basculements [own translation]. ↩︎
Guy Debord in The Society of the Spectacle. ↩︎
The “nation” understood as a physical territory, not as an ethnocultural entity. ↩︎
Right to kill prisoners when they escape from prison. The escapes are almost always provoked in order to kill them more easily. ↩︎
“By day we work in their factories, but by night the city is ours” is the slogan of the time, taken up by Chris Ealham in The Fight for Barcelona. ↩︎
The historian Agustín Guillamón says of July 19th in Barcelona: “In thirty-two hours the people of Barcelona had defeated the army. (…) Around nine in the morning an unstoppable revolutionary contagion began, mimetic and massive, curious and audacious, which by midday had become a mass phenomenon, throwing an immense crowd onto the streets who wanted to participate at all costs in the battle of Barcelona against fascism, inflamed by the fear of missing the opportunity to intervene in whatever way they could in the now certain popular victory”. Barricades in Barcelona, Ediciones Espartaco Internacional, 2007. ↩︎
The initiative came from the people, especially the people influenced by the anarchists. (…) What was surprising when talking to these peasants was that the vast majority of them were illiterate, but they had faith, common and practical sense, a spirit of sacrifice and the will to build a new world. I do not intend to make a demagogic apology for ignorance. What these men had was a mentality, a heart and a spirit that education does not provide and that even official education tends to stifle. Gaston Leval, L’attivitá sindacale nella trasformazione sociale [own translation]. ↩︎
For example, the unification in a few days of the three railway companies in the province of Barcelona and the tram company in the capital. To this end, a brigade was created to standardize the different materials used by the companies and synchronize the timetables. This adjustment showed, despite the speed with which it was carried out, exemplary efficiency thanks to the preparation of the CNT unions and —unlike what happened in Great Britain during the privatization of the railways in the 1980s and in France and the Iberian Peninsula in 2000 and 2002, where there were several accidents and a clear deterioration of services— no damage or derailments were recorded. ↩︎
“The collective was not the Union, because it included all those who wanted to join it, whether or not they were producers in the classical sense of the word. Moreover, it brought them together in the human and integral dimension of the person, and not only in that of the profession. (…) Everyone had the same rights and duties; there were no longer professional categories that opposed each other and turned producers into privileged consumers compared to those who — like housewives — did not produce, always in the economic or classical sense of the word. (…) It was, perhaps, a question of euphony and open-mindedness, of humanism: the human being beyond the producer. There is no need for unions when there is no longer a boss.
Espagne libertaire 36-39, Gaston Leval, Éditions du Monde Libertaire, 1983, pp. 386-387 [own translation]. ↩︎
Lorenzo, 2006, pp. 172-173, cited in Los caminos del comunismo libertario en España (1868-1937), Myrtille Gonzalbo, gimenóloga, ed. Pepitas de Calabaza, 2022. ↩︎
Agustín Guillamón, Barricadas en Barcelona, p. 52, Espartaco Internacional, January 2017. ↩︎
Cultivating under the bombs: https://dialnet.unirioja.es/descarga/articulo/8011475.pdf ↩︎
The Generalitat de Catalunya was the Catalan self-governing body created in 1931 and which functioned until 1939 within the framework of the Second Spanish Republic. During that period, this institution was known as the “Republican Generalitat” and enjoyed a greater degree of autonomy than under the current monarchy. ↩︎
Despite appearances, the CCMA was in fact a government in disguise, a kind of Popular Front with representatives from the Generalitat, the bourgeois republican parties, the Stalinists of the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia, the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification and the higher committees of the CNT. ↩︎
Agustín Guillamón Barricadas en Barcelona, p. 84. ↩︎
Capitalist careerism reappeared, but with the difference that there was no longer one owner but dozens: in Barcelona, and in almost all the cities and industrial centers of Catalonia, each factory produced and sold its goods on its own, each one looking for its customers and competing for them with rival factories. Worker neo-capitalism had been born… In trade, this same neo-capitalism manifested itself on a much larger scale. In the factories and companies that were in the hands of the unions, production increased or, at least, did not present deficits: more was produced according to the available resources. Furthermore, it was not considered immoral for wages to be two or three times higher depending on the available raw materials and the marketing skills possessed. Gaston Leval, L’attivitá sindacale nella trasformazione sociale [own translation]. ↩︎
The Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia or PSUC (Partit Socialista Unificat de Catalunya, in Catalan) was a Catalan party belonging to the Communist International (Comintern) and federated in the Communist Party of Spain (PCE). Created in 1936, it was dissolved in 1987. Source: Wikipedia. ↩︎
The POUM (Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification) was a party founded in 1935 that defined itself as Marxist revolutionary, in opposition to Stalinism, and close to Trotskyism. ↩︎
A government which sends fifteen-year-olds with forty-year-old rifles to the front, leaving its strongest men and most modern weapons in the rear, is obviously more afraid of revolution than of fascism. Therein lies the explanation of the weakness of war policy over the last six months, and of the concession that it is practically certain that the war will end.
George Orwell in a letter to Geoffrey Gorer dated September 5, 1937. https://acontretemps.org/spip.php?article223 ↩︎
George Orwell, who lived through the events of May 1937 and later wrote the book Homage to Catalonia, had this to say about the suppression of the POUM in a letter to Geoffrey Gorer dated September 5, 1937: In the first place, [the suppression of the POUM] makes clear to foreigners what was already obvious to some observers in Spain: that the present government has more in common with fascism than it differs from it. (Which is not to say that it is not worth fighting against the more open fascism of Franco and Hitler. I had already noticed the fascist tendencies of the government in May, but I was still willing to return to the front and that is what I did.)
See: https://acontretemps.org/spip.php?article223 [own translation]. ↩︎
George Orwell, in the same letter, sums it up admirably: It may, of course, be that the revolution was irretrievably lost in those few days in May. But I think, nevertheless, that the loss of the revolution was a lesser evil, though not by much, than the loss of the war. https://acontretemps.org/spip.php?article223 [own translation]. ↩︎
I would like to point out a curious fact: the fiasco of the leadership, the leading heads, the “strong men”. I am not only talking about politicians or socialist and communist leaders. I am also referring to prominent anarchist activists, the so-called leaders. (…) The fact is that they were, above all, destroyers. The struggle against the state and capitalist society had imbued them with a tactical political sense, to which they subordinated their entire culture and personal prestige.
G. Leval, L’attivitá sindacale nella trasformazione sociale [own translation]. ↩︎
Agustín Guillamón sums it up perfectly: Revolutionary anti-fascism does not exist, beyond the empty rhetoric of a confusing oxymoron. Anti-fascism is always democratic and inclusive, it is never anti-system and it is always objectively counter-revolutionary. Another thing entirely is the distorted and false image that anti-fascist militants believe and spread of themselves as fighting cocks with an enormous spur, when they are only plucked birds, ready to be slaughtered and thrown into the cauldron [own translation]. ↩︎
Agustín Guillamón sums it up perfectly: Revolutionary anti-fascism does not exist, beyond the empty rhetoric of a confusing oxymoron. Anti-fascism is always democratic and inclusive, it is never anti-system and it is always objectively counter-revolutionary. Another thing entirely is the distorted and false image that anti-fascist militants believe and spread of themselves as fighting cocks with an enormous spur, when they are only plucked birds, ready to be slaughtered and thrown into the cauldron.
See: Acting Here and Now: Pensar la ecología social by Murray Bookchin, Floreal M. Romero, Ediciones Kaicrón ↩︎
As billionaire Warren Buffet said in 2006: There is a class war, that is a fact, but it is my class, the rich class, that is waging it, and we are winning it (New York Times, November 26, 2006). quoted in: https://www.eldiario.es/canariasahora/canarias-opina/neoliberalismo-siempre-ganaran-ricos_132_6015867.html . ↩︎
Only what we love can be defended. In addition to the bond of trust, and even direct collaboration through mutual aid, this practice is in itself a school of life, a strong development of empathy and immersion in the natural environment through the sensory apprehension of our link with nature and the pleasure of being part of it and collaborating with it. ↩︎
Reprendre la terre aux machines by l’Atelier Paysan Ed du Seuil 2021. See: Farmers of l’Atelier Paysan ↩︎

Rebotes:

Translated by TerKo with the help of a free translation tool.

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