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version of Section I.
I.8 Does revolutionary Spain show that libertarian socialism can work in practice?
Yes. As Murray Bookchin puts it, "[i]n Spain, millions of people took large
segments of the economy into their own hands, collectivised them,
administered them, even abolished money and lived by communistic principles
of work and distribution -- all of this in the midst of a terrible
civil war, yet without producing the chaos or even the serious dislocations
that were and still are predicted by authoritarian 'radicals.' Indeed,
in many collectivised areas, the efficiency with which an enterprise
worked by far exceeded that of a comparable one in nationalised or
private sectors. This 'green shoot' of revolutionary reality has more
meaning for us than the most persuasive theoretical arguments to the
contrary. On this score it is not the anarchists who are the 'unrealistic
day-dreamers,' but their opponents who have turned their backs to
the facts or have shamelessly concealed them." ["Introductory
Essay," in The Anarchist Collectives, Sam Dolgoff (ed.),
p. xxxix]
Sam Dolgoff's book is by far the best English source on the Spanish
collectives and deserves to be quoted at length (as we do below).
He quotes French Anarchist Gaston Leval comments that in those areas
which defeated the fascist uprising on the 19th of July 1936 a profound
social revolution took place based, mostly, on anarchist ideas:
"In Spain, during almost three years, despite a civil war that took
a million lives, despite the opposition of the political parties . . .
this idea of libertarian communism was put into effect. Very quickly
more than 60% of the land was very quickly collectively cultivated by
the peasants themselves, without landlords, without bosses, and without
instituting capitalist competition to spur production. In almost all the
industries, factories, mills, workshops, transportation services, public
services, and utilities, the rank and file workers, their revolutionary
committees, and their syndicates reorganised and administered production,
distribution, and public services without capitalists, high-salaried
managers, or the authority of the state.
"Even more: the various agrarian and industrial collectives immediately instituted
economic equality in accordance with the essential principle of
communism, 'From each according to his ability and to each according
to his needs.' They co-ordinated their efforts through free association
in whole regions, created new wealth, increased production (especially
in agriculture), built more schools, and bettered public services.
They instituted not bourgeois formal democracy but genuine grass
roots functional libertarian democracy, where each individual participated
directly in the revolutionary reorganisation of social life. They
replaced the war between men, 'survival of the fittest,' by the
universal practice of mutual aid, and replaced rivalry by the principle
of solidarity . . .
"This experience, in which about eight million people directly
or indirectly participated, opened a new way of life to those who
sought an alternative to anti-social capitalism on the one hand,
and totalitarian state bogus socialism on the other." [Op.
Cit., pp. 6-7]
Thus about eight million people directly or indirectly participated
in the libertarian based new economy during the short time it was
able to survive the military assaults of the fascists and the attacks
and sabotage of the Communists. This in itself suggests that libertarian
socialist ideas are of a practical nature.
Lest the reader think that Dolgoff and Bookchin are exaggerating
the accomplishments and ignoring the failures of the Spanish collectives,
in the following subsections we will present specific details and
answer some objections often raised by misinformed critics. We will
try to present an objective analysis of the revolution, its many successes,
its strong points and weak points, the mistakes made and possible
lessons to be drawn from the experience, both from the successes and
the mistakes.
This libertarian influenced revolution has (generally) been ignored
by historians, or its existence mentioned in passing. Some so-called
historians and "objective investigators" have slandered it
and lied about (when not ignoring) the role anarchists played in it.
Communist histories are particularly unreliable (to use a polite word
for their activities) but it seems that almost every political
perspective has done this (including liberal, right-wing libertarian,
Stalinist, Trotskyist, Marxist, and so on). Indeed, the myths generated
by Marxists of various shades are quite extensive (see the appendix
on "Marxists and Spanish Anarchism"
for a reply to some of the more common ones).
Thus any attempt to investigate what actually occurred in Spain
and the anarchists' role in it is subject to a great deal of difficulty.
Moreover, the positive role that Anarchists played in the revolution
and the positive results of our ideas when applied in practice are
also downplayed, if not ignored. Indeed, the misrepresentations of
the Spanish Anarchist movement are downright amazing (see Jerome R.
Mintz's wonderful book The Anarchists of Casa Viejas for a
refutation of the historians claims, a refutation based on oral history,
as well as J. Romero Maura's, "The Spanish case", contained
in Anarchism Today, edited by J. Joll and D. Apter. Both are
essential reading to understand the distortions of historians about
the Spanish anarchist movement).
All we can do here is present a summary of the social revolution
that took place and attempt to explode a few of the myths that have
been created around the work of the C.N.T. and F.A.I. during those
years.
In addition, we must stress that this section of the FAQ can be
nothing but an introduction to the Spanish Revolution. We concentrate
on the economic and political aspects of the revolution as we cannot
cover the social transformations that occurred. All across non-fascist
Spain traditional social relationships between men and women, adults
and children, individual and individual were transformed, revolutionised,
in a libertarian way. C.N.T. militant Abel Paz gives a good indication
of this when he wrote:
"Industry is in the hands of the workers and all the production
centres conspicuously fly the red and black flags as well as
inscriptions announcing that they have really become collectives.
The revolution seems to be universal. Changes are also evident
in social relations. The former barriers which used to separate
men and woman arbitrarily have been destroyed. In the cafes and
other public places there is a mingling of the sexes which would
have been completely unimaginable before. The revolution has
introduced a fraternal character to social relations which has
deepened with practice and show clearly that the old world is
dead." [Durruti: The People Armed, p. 243]
The social transformation empowered individuals and these, in turn,
transformed society. Anarchist militant Enriqueta Rovira presents
a vivid picture of the self-liberation the revolution generated:
"The atmosphere then [during the revolution], the feelings were
very special. It was beautiful. A feeling of -- how shall I say
it -- of power, not in the sense of domination, but in the
sense of things being under our control, of under anyone's.
Of possibility. We had everything. We had Barcelona: It
was ours. You'd walk out in the streets, and they were ours
-- here, CNT; there, comite this or that. It was totally
different. Full of possibility. A feeling that we could,
together, really do something. That we could make things
different." [quoted by Martha A. Ackelsberg and Myrna
Margulies Breithart, "Terrains of Protest: Striking City
Women", pp. 151-176, Our Generation, vol. 19, No. 1,
pp. 164-5]
Moreover, the transformation of society that occurred during the
revolution extended to all areas of life and work. For example, the
revolution saw "the creation of a health workers' union, a true
experiment in socialised medicine. They provided medical assistance
and opened hospitals and clinics." [Juan Gomez Casas, Anarchist
Organisation: The History of the FAI, p. 192] We discuss this
example in some detail in section I.5.12
and so will not do so here. Therefore, we must stress that this section
of the FAQ is just an introduction to what happened and does not (indeed,
cannot) discuss all aspects of the revolution. We just present an
overview, bringing out the libertarian aspects of the revolution,
the ways workers' self-management was organised, how the collectives
organised and what they did.
Needless to say, many mistakes were made during the revolution.
We point out and discuss some of them in what follows. Moreover, much
of what happened did not correspond exactly with what many people
consider as the essential steps in a communist (libertarian or otherwise)
revolution. Economically, for example, few collectives reached beyond
a mutualist or collectivist state. Politically, the fear of a fascist
victory made many anarchists accept collaboration with the state as
a lessor evil. However, to dismiss the Spanish Revolution because
it did not meet the ideas laid out by a handful of revolutionaries
would be sectarian and elitist nonsense. No working class revolution
is pure, no mass struggle is without its contradictions, no attempt
to change society will be perfect. "It is only those who do nothing
who make no mistakes," as Kropotkin so correctly pointed out.
[Kropotkin's Revolutionary Pamphlets, p. 143] The question
is whether the revolution creates a system of institutions which will
allow those involved to discuss the problems they face and correct
the decisions they make. In this, the Spanish Revolution clearly succeeded,
creating organisations based on the initiative, autonomy and power
of working class people.
For more information about the social revolution, Sam Dolgoff's
The Anarchist Collectives is an excellent starting place. Gaston
Leval's Collectives in the Spanish Revolution is another essential
text. Jose Pierat's Anarchists in the Spanish Revolution and
Vernon Richards' Lessons of the Spanish Revolution are excellent
critical anarchist works on the revolution and the role of the anarchists.
Robert Alexander's The Anarchists in the Spanish Civil War
is a good general overview of the anarchist's role in the revolution
and civil war, as is Burnett Bolloten's The Spanish Civil War.
Noam Chomsky's excellent essay "Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship"
indicates how liberal books on the Spanish Civil War can be misleading,
unfair and essentially ideological in nature (this classic essay can
be found in The Chomsky Reader and American Power and the
New Mandarins). George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia cannot
be bettered as an introduction to the subject (Orwell was in the POUM
militia at the Aragon Front and was in Barcelona during the May Days
of 1937).
Quite the reverse. More urban workers took part in the revolution than in
the countryside. So while it is true that collectivisation was extensive
in rural areas, the revolution also made its mark in urban areas and
in industry.
In total, the "regions most affected" by collectivisation
"were Catalonia and Aragon, were about 70 per cent of the workforce
was involved. The total for the whole of Republican territory was
nearly 800,000 on the land and a little more than a million in industry.
In Barcelona workers' committees took over all the services, the oil
monopoly, the shipping companies, heavy engineering firms such as
Volcano, the Ford motor company, chemical companies, the textile industry
and a host of smaller enterprises. . . Services such as water, gas
and electricity were working under new management within hours of
the storming of the Atarazanas barracks . . .a conversion of appropriate
factories to war production meant that metallurgical concerns had
started to produce armed cars by 22 July . . . The industrial workers
of Catalonia were the most skilled in Spain . . . One of the most
impressive feats of those early days was the resurrection of the public
transport system at a time when the streets were still littered and
barricaded." Five days after the fighting had stopped, 700 tramcars
rather than the usual 600, all painted in the colours of the CNT-FAI
were operating in Barcelona." [Antony Beevor, The Spanish Civil
War, pp. 91-2]
About 75% of Spanish industry was concentrated in Catalonia, the
stronghold of the anarchist labour movement, and widespread collectivisation
of factories took place there. However, collectivisation was not limited
to Catalonia and took place all across urban as well as rural Republican
Spain. As Sam Dolgoff rightly observes, "[t]his refutes decisively
the allegation that anarchist organisational principles are not applicable
to industrial areas, and if at all, only in primitive agrarian societies
or in isolated experimental communities." [The Anarchist Collectives,
pp. 7-8]
There had been a long tradition of peasant collectivism in the Iberian
Peninsula, as there was among the Berbers and in the ancient Russian
mir. The historians Costa and Reparaz maintain that a great
many Iberian collectives can be traced to "a form of rural libertarian-communism
[which] existed in the Iberian Peninsula before the Roman invasion.
Not even five centuries of oppression by Catholic kings, the State
and the Church have been able to eradicate the spontaneous tendency
to establish libertarian communistic communities." [cited, Op.
Cit., p. 20] So it is not surprising that there were collectives
in the countryside.
According to Augustin Souchy, "[i]t is no simple matter to collectivise
and place on firm foundations an industry employing almost a quarter
of a million textile workers in scores of factories scattered in numerous
cities. But the Barcelona syndicalist textile union accomplished this
feat in a short time. It was a tremendously significant experiment.
The dictatorship of the bosses was toppled, and wages, working conditions
and production were determined by the workers and their elected delegates.
All functionaries had to carry out the instructions of the membership
and report back directly to the men on the job and union meetings.
The collectivisation of the textile industry shatters once and for
all the legend that the workers are incapable of administrating a
great and complex corporation" [cited, Op. Cit., p. 94].
Moreover, Spain in the 1930s was not a "backward, peasant country,"
as is sometimes supposed. Between 1910 and 1930, the industrial working
class more than doubled to over 2,500,000. This represented just over
26% of the working population (compared to 16% twenty years previously).
In 1930, 45 per cent of the working population were engaged in agriculture.
[Ronald Fraser, The Blood of Spain, p. 38] In Catalonia alone,
200,000 workers were employed in the textile industry and 70,000 in
metal-working and machinery manufacturing. This was very different
than the situation in Russia at the end of World War I, where the
urban working class made up only 10% of the population.
Capitalist social relations had also penetrated agriculture much
more thoroughly than in "backward, underdeveloped" countries
by the 1930s. In Russia at the end of World War I, for example, agriculture
mostly consisted of small farms on which peasant families worked mainly
for their own subsistence, bartering or selling their surplus. In
Spain, however, agriculture was oriented to the world market and by
the 1930s approximately 90% of farm land was in the hands of the bourgeoisie.
[Fraser, Op. Cit., p. 37] Spanish agribusiness also employed
large numbers of labourers who did not own enough land to support
themselves. The revolutionary labour movement in the Spanish countryside
in the 1930s was precisely based on this large population of rural
wage-earners (the socialist UGT land workers union had 451,000 members
in 1933, 40% of its total membership, for example).
Therefore the Spanish Revolution cannot be dismissed as a product
a of pre-industrial society. The urban collectivisations occurred
predominately in the most heavily industrialised part of Spain and
indicate that anarchist ideas are applicable to modern societies (indeed,
the CNT organised most of the unionised urban working class). By 1936
agriculture itself was predominately capitalist (with 2% of the population
owning 67% of the land). The revolution in Spain was the work (mostly)
of rural and urban wage labourers (joined with poor peasants) fighting
a well developed capitalist system.
Therefore, the anarchist revolution in Spain has many lessons for
revolutionaries in developed capitalist countries and cannot be dismissed
as a product of industrial backwardness.
Anarchism was introduced in Spain in 1868 by Giuseppi Fanelli, an associate
of Michael Bakunin, and found fertile soil among both the workers
and the peasants of Spain.
The peasants supported anarchism because of the rural tradition
of Iberian collectivism mentioned in the last
section. The urban workers supported it because its ideas of direct
action, solidarity and free federation of unions corresponded to their
needs in their struggle against capitalism and the state.
In addition, many Spanish workers were well aware of the dangers
of centralisation and the republican tradition in Spain was very much
influenced by federalist ideas (coming, in part, from Proudhon's work).
The movement later spread back and forth between countryside and cities
as union organisers and anarchist militants visited villages and as
peasants came to industrial cities like Barcelona, looking for work.
Therefore, from the start anarchism in Spain was associated with
the labour movement (as Bakunin desired) and so anarchists had a practical
area to apply their ideas and spread the anarchist message. By applying
their principles in everyday life, the anarchists in Spain ensured
that anarchist ideas became commonplace and accepted in a large section
of the population.
This acceptance of anarchism cannot be separated from the structure
and tactics of the C.N.T. and its fore-runners. The practice of direct
action and solidarity encouraged workers to rely on themselves to
identify and solve their own problems. The decentralised structure
of the anarchist unions had an educational effect of their members.
By discussing issues, struggles, tactics, ideals and politics in their
union assemblies, the members of the union educated themselves and,
by the process of self-management in the struggle, prepared themselves
for a free society. The very organisational structure of the C.N.T.
ensured the dominance of anarchist ideas and the political evolution
of the union membership. As one C.N.T. militant from Casas Viejas
put it, new members "asked for too much, because they lacked education.
They thought they could reach the sky without a ladder . . . they
were beginning to learn . . . There was good faith but lack of education.
For that reason we would submit ideas to the assembly, and the bad
ideas would be thrown out." [quoted by J. Mintz, The Anarchists
of Casas Viejas, p. 27]
It was by working in the union meetings that anarchists influenced
their fellow workers. The idea that the anarchists, through the F.A.I,
controlled the C.N.T is a myth. Not all anarchists in the C.N.T were
members of the F.A.I, for example. Almost all F.A.I members were also
rank-and-file members of the C.N.T. who took part in union meetings
as equals. Anarchists were not members of the FAI indicate this. Jose
Borras Casacarosa notes that "[o]ne has to recognise that the F.A.I.
did not intervene in the C.N.T. from above or in an authoritarian
manner as did other political parties in the unions. It did so from
the base through militants . . . the decisions which determined the
course taken by the C.N.T. were taken under constant pressure from
these militants." Jose Campos notes that F.A.I. militants "tended
to reject control of confederal committees and only accepted them
on specific occassions . . . if someone proposed a motion in assembly,
the other F.A.I. members would support it, usually successfully. It
was the individual standing of the faista in open assembly."
[quoted by Stuart Christie, We, the Anarchists, p. 62]
This explains the success of anarchism in the CNT. Anarchist ideas,
principles and tactics, submitted to the union assemblies, proved
to be good ideas and were not thrown out. The structure of the organisation,
in other words, decisively influenced the content of the decisions
reached as ideas, tactics, union policy and so on were discussed by
the membership and those which best applied to the members lives were
accepted and implemented. The C.N.T assemblies showed the validity
of Bakunin's arguments for self-managed unions as a means of ensuring
workers' control of their own destinies and organisations. As he put
it, the union "sections could defend their rights and their autonomy
[against union bureaucracy] in only one way: the workers called general
membership meetings . . . In these great meetings of the sections,
the items on the agenda were amply discussed and the most progressive
opinion prevailed." [Bakunin on Anarchism, p. 247] The
C.N.T was built on such "popular assemblies," with the same
radicalising effect. It showed, in practice, that bosses (capitalist
as well as union ones) were not needed -- workers can manage their
own affairs directly. As a school for anarchism it could not be bettered
as it showed that anarchist principles were not utopian. The C.N.T,
by being based on workers' self-management of the class struggle,
prepared its members for workers' self-management of the revolution
and the new society.
The Spanish Revolution also shows the importance of anarchist education
and media. In a country with a very high illiteracy rate, huge quantities
of literature on social revolution were disseminated and read out
loud at meetings by those who could read to those who could not. Anarchist
ideas were widely discussed. "There were tens of thousands of books,
pamphlets and tracts, vast and daring cultural and popular educational
experiments (the Ferrer schools) that reached into almost every village
and hamlet throughout Spain." [The Anarchist Collectives,
p. 27] The discussion of political, economic and social ideas was
continuous, and "the centro [local union hall] became the gathering
place to discuss social issues and to dream and plan for the future.
Those who aspired to learn to read and write would sit around . .
. studying." [Jerome R. Mintz, The Anarchists of Casas Viejas,
p. 160] One anarchist militant described it as follows:
"With what joy the orators were received whenever a meeting
was held . . . We spoke that night about everything: of the
ruling inequality of the regime and of how one had a right
to a life without selfishness, hatred, without wars and
suffering. We were called on another occasion and a crowd
gathered larger than the first time. That's how the pueblo
started to evolve, fighting the present regime to win
something by which they could sustain themselves, and
dreaming of the day when it would be possible to create
that society some depict in books, others by word of mouth.
Avid for learning, they read everything, debated, discussed,
and chatted about the different modes of perfect social
existence." [Perez Cordon, quoted by Jerome R. Mintz,
Op. Cit., p. 158]
Newspapers and periodicals were extremely important. By 1919, more
than 50 towns in Andalusia had their own libertarian newspapers. By
1934 the C.N.T. (the anarcho-syndicalist labour union) had a membership
of around one million and the anarchist press covered all of Spain.
In Barcelona the C.N.T. published a daily, Solidaridad Obrera
(Worker Solidarity), with a circulation of 30,000. The FAI's magazine
Tierra y Libertad (Land and Liberty) had a circulation of 20,000.
In Gijon there was Vida Obrera (Working Life), in Seville El
Productor (The Producer), and in Saragossa Accion y Cultura
(Action and Culture), each with a large circulation. There were many
more.
As well as leading struggles, organising unions, and producing books,
papers and periodicals, the anarchists also organised libertarian
schools, cultural centres, co-operatives, anarchist groups (the F.A.I),
youth groups (the Libertarian Youth) and women's organisations (the
Free Women movement). They applied their ideas in all walks of life
and so ensured that ordinary people saw that anarchism was practical
and relevant to them.
This was the great strength of the Spanish Anarchist movement. It
was a movement "that, in addition to possessing a revolutionary
ideology [sic], was also capable of mobilising action around objectives
firmly rooted in the life and conditions of the working class . .
. It was this ability periodically to identify and express widely
felt needs and feelings that, together with its presence at community
level, formed the basis of the strength of radical anarchism, and
enabled it to build a mass base of support." [Nick Rider, "The
practice of direct action: the Barcelona rent strike of 1931",
p. 99, from For Anarchism, pp. 79-105]
Historian Temma Kaplan stressed this in her work on the Andalusian
anarchists. She argued that the anarchists were "rooted in"
social life and created "a movement firmly based in working-class
culture." They "formed trade unions, affinity groups such as
housewives' sections, and broad cultural associations such as workers'
circles, where the anarchist press was read and discussed." Their
"great strength . . . lay in the merger of communal and militant
trade union traditions. In towns where the vast majority of worked
in agriculture, agricultural workers' unions came to be identified
with the community as a whole . . . anarchism . . . show[ed] that
the demands of agricultural workers and proletarians could be combined
with community support to create an insurrectionary situation . .
. It would be a mistake . . . to argue that 'village anarchism' in
Andalusia was distinct from militant unionism, or that the movement
was a surrogate religion." [Anarchists of Andalusia: 1868-1903,
p. 211, p. 207, pp. 204-5]
The Spanish anarchists, before and after the C.N.T was formed, fought
in and out of the factory for economic, social and political issues.
This refusal of the anarchists to ignore any aspect of life ensured
that they found many willing to hear their message, a message based
around the ideas of individual liberty. Such a message could do nothing
but radicalise workers for "the demands of the C.N.T went much
further than those of any social democrat: with its emphasis on true
equality, autogestion [self-management] and working class dignity,
anarchosyndicalism made demands the capitalist system could not possibly
grant to the workers." [J. Romero Maura, "The Spanish case",
p. 79, from Anarchism Today, edited by J. Joll and D. Apter]
Strikes, due to the lack of strike funds, depended on mutual aid
to be won, which fostered a strong sense of solidarity and class consciousness
in the CNT membership. Strikes did not just involve workers. For example,
workers in Jerez responded to bosses importing workers from Malaga
"with a weapon of their own -- a boycott of those using strikebreakers.
The most notable boycotts were against landowners near Jerez who also
had commercial establishments in the city. The workers and their wives
refused to buy there, and the women stationed themselves nearby to
discourage other shoppers." [Jerome R. Mintz, Op. Cit.,
p. 102]
The structure and tactics of the C.N.T encouraged the politicisation,
initiative and organisational skills of its members. It was a federal,
decentralised body, based on direct discussion and decision making
from the bottom up. "The C.N.T tradition was to discuss and examine
everything", as one militant put it. In addition, the C.N.T created
a viable and practical example of an alternative method by which society
could be organised. A method which was based on the ability of ordinary
people to direct society themselves and which showed in practice that
special ruling authorities are undesirable and unnecessary.
The very structure of the C.N.T and the practical experience it
provided its members in self-management produced a revolutionary working
class the likes of which the world has rarely seen. As Jose Peirats
points out, "above the union level, the C.N.T was an eminently
political organisation . . ., a social and revolutionary organisation
for agitation and insurrection." [Anarchists in the Spanish
Revolution, p. 239]
The C.N.T. was organised in such a way as to encourage solidarity
and class consciousness. Its organisation was based on the sindicato
unico (one union) which united all workers of the same workplace
in the same union. Instead of organising by trade, and so dividing
the workers into numerous different unions, the C.N.T united all workers
in a workplace into the same organisation, all trades, skilled and
unskilled, where in a single organisation and so solidarity was increased
and encouraged as well as increasing their fighting power by eliminating
divisions within the workforce. All the unions in an area were linked
together into a local federation, the local federations into a regional
federation and so on. As J. Romero Maura argues, the "territorial
basis of organisation linkage brought all the workers from one area
together and fomented working-class solidarity over and above corporate
[industry or trade] solidarity." ["The Spanish case", p.
75, from Anarchism Today, edited by J. Joll and D. Apter]
Thus the structure of the C.N.T. encouraged class solidarity and
consciousness. In addition, being based on direct action and self-management,
the union ensured that working people became accustomed to managing
their own struggles and acting for themselves, directly. This prepared
them to manage their own personal and collective interests in a free
society (as seen by the success of the self-managed collectives created
in the revolution). Thus the process of self-managed struggle and
direct action prepared people for the necessities of the social revolution
and the an anarchist society -- it built, as Bakunin argued, the seeds
of the future in the present.
In other words, "the route to radicalisation . . . came from
direct involvement in struggle and in the design of alternative social
institutions." Every strike and action empowered those involved
and created a viable alternative to the existing system. For example,
while the strikes and food protests in Barcelona at the end of the
First World War "did not topple the government, patterns of organisation
established then provided models for the anarchist movement for years
to follow." [Martha A. Ackelsberg and Myrna Margulies Breithart,
"Terrains of Protest: Striking City Women", pp. 151-176, Our
Generation, vol. 19, No. 1, p. 164] The same could be said of
every strike, which confirmed Bakunin's and Kropotkin's stress on
the strike as not only creating class consciousness and confidence
but also the structures necessary to not only fight capitalism, but
to replace it.
It was the revolutionary nature of the C.N.T. that created a militant
membership who were willing and able to use direct action to defend
their liberty. Unlike the Marxist led German workers, organised in
a centralised fashion and trained in the obedience required by hierarchy,
who did nothing to stop Hitler, the Spanish working class (like their
comrades in anarchist unions in Italy) took to the streets to stop
fascism.
The revolution in Spain did not "just happen"; it was the result
of nearly seventy years of persistent anarchist agitation and revolutionary
struggle, including a long series of peasant uprisings, insurrections,
industrial strikes, protests, sabotage and other forms of direct action
that prepared the peasants and workers organise popular resistance
to the attempted fascist coup in July 1937 and to take control of
the economy when they had defeated it in the streets.
Marta A. Ackelsberg gives us an excellent short summary of how the industrial
collectives where organised:
"In most collectivised industries, general assemblies of workers
decided policy, while elected committees managed affairs on a
day-to-day basis." [Free Women of Spain, p. 73]
The collectives were based on workers' democratic self-management
of their workplaces, using productive assets that were under the custodianship
of the entire working community and administered through federations
of workers' associations. Augustin Souchy writes:
"The collectives organised during the Spanish Civil War were workers'
economic associations without private property. The fact that collective
plants were managed by those who worked in them did not mean that these
establishments became their private property. The collective had no right to
sell or rent all or any part of the collectivised factory or workshop, The rightful custodian was the C.N.T., the National Confederation of Workers
Associations. But not even the C.N.T. had the right to do as it pleased.
Everything had to be decided and ratified by the workers themselves through
conferences and congresses." [cited in The Anarchist Collectives, p. 67]
According to Souchy, in Catalonia "every factory elected its
administrative committee composed of its most capable workers. Depending
on the size of the factory, the function of these committees included
inner plant organisation, statistics, finance, correspondence, and
relations with other factories and with the community. . . . Several
months after collectivisation the textile industry of Barcelona was
in far better shape than under capitalist management. Here was yet
another example to show that grass roots socialism from below does
not destroy initiative. Greed is not the only motivation in human
relations." [Op. Cit., p 95]
Thus the individual collective was based on a mass assembly of those
who worked there. This assembly nominated administrative staff who
were mandated to implement the decisions of the assembly and who had
to report back to, and were accountable to, that assembly. For example,
in Castellon de la Plana "[e]very month the technical and administrative
council presented the general assembly of the Syndicate with a report
which was examined and discussed if necessary, and finally introduced
when this majority thought it of use. Thus all the activities were
known and controlled by all the workers. We find here a practical
example of libertarian democracy." [Collectives in the Spanish
Revolution, p. 303]
So, in general, the industrial collectives were organised from the
bottom-up, with policy in the hands of workers' assemblies who elected
the administration required, including workplace committees and managers.
However, power rested the at base of the collective, with "all
important decisions [being] taken by the general assemblies of the
workers, . . . [which] were widely attended and regularly held. .
. if an administrator did something which the general assembly had
not authorised, he was likely to be deposed at the next meeting."
An example of this process can be seen from the Casa Rivieria company.
After the defeat of the army coup "a control committe (Comite de
Control) was named by the Barcelona Metal Workers' Union to take over
temporary control of the enterprises. . . A few weeks after July 19th,
there was the first general assembly of the firm's workers . . . It
elected an enterprise committee (Comite de Empresa) to take control
of the firm on a more permanent basis. . . . Each of the four sections
of the firm -- the three factories and the office staff -- held their
own general assemblies at least once a week. There they discussed
matters ranging from the most important affairs to the most trivial."
[Robert Alexander, The Anarchists in the Spanish Civil War,
vol. 1, p. 469 and p. 532]
A plenum of syndicates met in December of 1936 and formulated norms
for socialisation in which the inefficiency of the capitalist industrial
system was analysed. The report of the plenum stated:
"The major defect of most small manufacturing shops is fragmentation
and lack of technical/commercial preparation. This prevents their
modernisation and consolidation into better and more efficient units
of production, with better facilities and co-ordination. . . . For us,
socialisation must correct these deficiencies and systems of organisation
in every industry. . . . To socialise an industry, we must consolidate
the different units of each branch of industry in accordance with a
general and organic plan which will avoid competition and other
difficulties impeding the good and efficient organisation of
production and distribution. . ." [cited by Souchy, The Anarchist
Collectives, p. 83]
As Souchy points out, this document is very important in the evolution
of collectivisation, because it indicates a realisation that "workers
must take into account that partial collectivisation will in time
degenerate into a kind of bourgeois co-operativism," [Op. Cit.,
p. 83] as discussed earlier. Thus many collectives did not compete
with each other for profits, as surpluses were pooled and distributed
on a wider basis than the individual collective -- in most cases industry-wide.
We have already noted some examples of the improvements in efficiency
realised by collectivisation during the Spanish Revolution ( section
I.4.10). Another example was the baking industry. Souchy reports
that, "[a]s in the rest of Spain, Barcelona's bread and cakes were
baked mostly at night in hundreds of small bakeries. Most of them
were in damp, gloomy cellars infested with roaches and rodents. All
these bakeries were shut down. More and better bread and cake were
baked in new bakeries equipped with new modern ovens and other equipment."
[Op. Cit., p. 82]
Therefore, the collectives in Spain were marked by workplace democracy
and a desire to co-operate within and across industries. This attempt
at libertarian socialism, like all experiments, had its drawbacks
as well as successes and these will be discussed in the next
section as well as some of the conclusions drawn from the experience.
The methods of co-operation tried by the collectives varied considerably.
Initially, there were very few attempts to co-ordinate economic activities
beyond the workplace. This is hardly surprising, given that the overwhelming
need was to restart production, convert a civilian economy to a wartime
one and to ensure that the civilian population and militias were supplied
with necessary goods. This, unsurprisingly enough, lead to a situation
of anarchist mutualism developing, with many collectives selling the
product of their own labour on the market (in other words, a form
of simple commodity production).
This lead to some economic problems as there existed no framework
of institutions between collectives to ensure efficient co-ordination
of activity and so lead to pointless competition between collectives
(which lead to even more problems). As there were initially no confederations
of collectives nor mutual/communal banks this lead to the inequalities
that initially existed between collectives (due to the fact that the
collectives took over rich and poor capitalist firms) and it made
the many ad hoc attempts at mutual aid between collectives difficult
and temporary.
Therefore, the collectives were (initially) a form of "self-management
straddling capitalism and socialism, which we maintain would not have
occurred had the Revolution been able to extend itself fully under
the direction of our syndicates." [Gaston Leval, Collectives
in the Spanish Revolution, pp. 227-8] As economic and political
development are closely related, the fact that the C.N.T. did not
carry out the political aspect of the revolution meant that
the revolution in the economy was doomed to failure. As Leval stresses,
in "the industrial collectives, especially in the large towns,
matters proceeded differently as a consequence of contradictory factors
and of opposition created by the co-existence of social currents emanating
from different social classes." [Op. Cit., p. 227]
Given that the C.N.T. program of libertarian communism recognised
that a fully co-operative society must be based upon production for
use, C.N.T. militants fought against this system of mutualism and
for inter-workplace co-ordination. They managed to convince their
fellow workers of the difficulties of mutualism by free debate and
discussion within their unions and collectives.
Therefore, the degree of socialisation varied over time (as would
be expected). Initially, after the initial defeat of Franco's forces,
there was little formal co-ordination and organisation. The most important
thing was to get production started again. However, the needs of co-ordination
soon became obvious (as predicted in anarchist theory and the programme
of the CNT). Gaston Leval gives the example of Hospitalet del Llobregat
with regards to this process:
"Local industries went through stages almost universally adopted in
that revolution . . . [I]n the first instance, comites nominated
by the workers employed in them [were organised]. Production and
sales continued in each one. But very soon it was clear that this
situation gave rise to competition between the factories. . .
creating rivalries which were incompatible with the socialist and
libertarian outlook. So the CNT launched the watchword: 'All
industries must be ramified in the Syndicates, completely socialised,
and the regime of solidarity which we have always advocated be
established once and for all.
"The idea won support immediately" [Op. Cit., pp. 291-2]
Another example was the woodworkers' union which a massive debate on
socialisation and decided to do so (the shopworkers' union had a similar
debate, but the majority of workers rejected socialisation). According
to Ronald Fraser a "union delegate would go round the small shops,
point out to the workers that the conditions were unhealthy and
dangerous, that the revolution was changing all this, and secure
their agreement to close down and move to the union-built Double-X
and the 33 EU." [Ronald Fraser, Blood of Spain, p. 222]
This process went on in many different unions and collectives and, unsurprisingly,
the forms of co-ordination agreed to lead to different forms of organisation
in different areas and industries, as would be expected in a free
society. However, the two most important forms can be termed syndicalisation
and confederationalism (we will ignore the forms created by the collectivisation
decree as these were not created by the workers themselves).
"Syndicalisation" (our term) meant that the C.N.T.'s industrial
union ran the whole industry. This solution was tried by the woodworkers'
union after extensive debate. One section of the union, "dominated
by the F.A.I. [the anarchist federation], maintained that anarchist
self-management meant that the workers should set up and operate autonomous
centres of production so as to avoid the threat of bureaucratisation."
[Ronald Fraser, Blood of Spain, p. 222] However, those in favour
of syndicalisation won the day and production was organised in the
hands of the union, with administration posts and delegate meetings
elected by the rank and file.
However, the "major failure . . . (and which supported the original
anarchist objection) was that the union became like a large firm .
. . [and its] structure grew increasingly rigid." According to
one militant, "From the outside it began to look like an American
or German trust" and the workers found it difficult to secure
any changes and "felt they weren't particularly involved in decision
making."
In the end, the major difference between the union-run industry
and a capitalist firm organisationally appeared to be that workers
could vote for (and recall) the industry management at relatively
regular General Assembly meetings. While a vast improvement on capitalism,
it is hardly the best example of participatory self-management in
action although the economic problems caused by the Civil War and
Stalinist led counter-revolution obviously would have had an effect
on the internal structure of any industry and so we cannot say that
the form of organisation created was totally responsible for any marginalisation
that took place.
The other important form of co-operation was what we will term "confederalisation."
This form of co-operation was practised by the Badalona textile industry
(and had been defeated in the woodworkers' union). It was based upon
each workplace being run by its elected management, sold its own production,
got its own orders and received the proceeds. However, everything
each mill did was reported to the union which charted progress and
kept statistics. If the union felt that a particular factory was not
acting in the best interests of the industry as a whole, it was informed
and asked to change course. According to one militant, the union "acted
more as a socialist control of collectivised industry than as a direct
hierarchised executive" [Op. Cit., p. 229]
This system ensured that the "dangers of the big 'union trust'
as of the atomised collective were avoided" [Fraser, Op. Cit.,
p. 229] as well as maximising decentralisation of power. Unlike the
syndicalisation experiment in the woodworkers' industry, this scheme
was based on horizontal links between workplaces (via the C.N.T. union)
and allowed a maximum of self-management and mutual aid. The
ideas of an anarchist economy sketched in section
I.3 reflects in many ways the actual experiments in self-management
which occurred during the Spanish Revolution.
Therefore, the industrial collectives co-ordinated their activity
in many ways, with varying degrees of direct democracy and success.
As would be expected, mistakes were made and different solutions found.
When reading this section of the FAQ its important to remember that
an anarchist society can hardly be produced "overnight" and
so it is hardly surprising that the workers of the C.N.T. faced numerous
problems and had to develop their self-management experiment as objective
conditions allowed them to.
Unfortunately, thanks to fascist aggression and Communist Party
back-stabbing, the experiment did not last long enough to fully answer
all the questions we have about the viability of the solutions they
tried. Given the time, however, we are sure they would have solved
the problems they faced.
Jose Peirats describes collectivisation among the peasantry as follows:
"The expropriated lands were turned over to the peasant syndicates, and it
was these syndicates that organised the first collectives. Generally the
holdings of small property owners were respected, always on the condition
that only they or their families would work the land, without employing
wage labour. In areas like Catalonia, where the tradition of petty peasant
ownership prevailed, the land holdings were scattered. There were no
great estates. Many of these peasants, together with the C.N.T., organised
collectives, pooling their land, animals, tools, chickens, grain,
fertiliser, and even their harvested crops.
"Privately owned farms located in the midst of collectives interfered with
efficient cultivation by splitting up the collectives into disconnected
parcels. To induce owners to move, they were given more or even
better land located on the perimeter of the collective.
"The collectivist who had nothing to contribute to the collective
was admitted with the same rights and the same duties as the others.
In some collectives, those joining had to contribute their money
(Girondella in Catalonia, Lagunarrotta in Aragon, and Cervera del
Maestra in Valencia)." [cited The Anarchist Collectives,
p. 112]
Peirats also notes that in conducting their internal affairs, all
the collectives scrupulously and zealously observed democratic procedures.
For example, "Hospitalet de Llobregat held regular general membership
meetings every three months to review production and attend to new
business. The administrative council, and all other committees, submitted
full reports on all matters. The meeting approved, disapproved, made
corrections, issued instructions, etc." [Ibid., p. 119]
Dolgoff observes that "supreme power was vested in, and actually
exercised by, the membership in general assemblies, and all power
derived from, and flowed back to, the grass roots organisations of
the people" and quotes Gaston Leval:
"Regular general membership meetings were convoked weekly, bi-weekly,
or monthly. . . and these meetings were completely free of the tensions
and recriminations which inevitably emerge when the power of decisions
is vested in a few individuals -- even if democratically elected. The
Assemblies were open for everyone to participate in the proceedings.
Democracy embraced all social life. In most cases, even the 'individualists'
who were not members of the collective could participate in the discussions,
and they were listened to by the collectivists." [Op. Cit., p 119f]
It was in these face-to-face assemblies that decisions upon the
distribution of resources were decided both within and without the
collective. Here, when considering the importance of mutual aid, appeals
were made to an individual's sense of empathy. As one activist remembers:
"There were, of course, those who didn't want to share and who said that
each collective should take care of itself. But they were usually convinced
in the assemblies. We would try to speak to them in terms they understood.
We'd ask, 'Did you think it was fair when the cacique [local boss] let people
starve if there wasn't enough work?' and they said, 'Of course not.' They
would eventually come around. Don't forget, there were three hundred
thousand collectivists [in Aragon], but only ten thousand of us had been
members of the C.N.T.. We had a lot of educating to do." [Felix Carrasquer,
quoted by Martha A. Ackelsberg in Free Women of Spain, p. 79]
In addition, regional federations of collectives were formed in
many areas of Spain (for example, in Aragon and the Levant). The federations
were created at congresses to which the collectives in an area sent
delegates. These congresses agreed a series of general rules about
how the federation would operate and what commitments the affiliated
collectives would have to each other. The congress elected an administration
council, which took responsibility for implementing agreed policy.
These federations had many tasks. They ensured the distribution
of surplus produce to the front line and to the cities, cutting out
middlemen and ensuring the end of exploitation. They also arranged
for exchanges between collectives to take place. In addition, the
federations allowed the individual collectives to pool resources together
in order to improve the infrastructure of the area (building roads,
canals, hospitals and so on) and invest in means of production which
no one collective could afford.
In this way individual collectives pooled their resources, increased
and improved the means of production they had access to as well as
improving the social infrastructure of their regions. All this, combined
with an increase of consumption at the point of production and the
feeding of militia men and women fighting the fascists at the front.
Rural collectivisations allowed the potential creative energy that
existed among the rural workers and peasants to be unleashed, an energy
that had been wasted under private property. The popular assemblies
allowed community problems and improvements to be identified and solved
directly, drawing upon the ideas and experiences of everyone and enriched
by discussion and debate. This enabled rural Spain to be transformed
from one marked by poverty and fear, into one of hope and experimentation
(see the next section for a few examples
of this experimentation).
Therefore self-management in collectives combined with co-operation
in rural federations allowed an improvement in quality of rural life.
From a purely economic viewpoint, production increased and as Benjamin
Martin summarises, "[t]hough it is impossible to generalise about
the rural land take-overs, there is little doubt that the quality
of life for most peasants who participated in co-operatives and collectives
notably improved." [The Agony of Modernisation, p. 394]
More importantly, however, this improvement in the quality of life
included an increase in freedom as well as in consumption. To requote
the member of the Beceite collective in Aragon we cited in section
A.5.6, "it was marvellous. . . to live in a collective, a free
society where one could say what one thought, where if the village
committee seemed unsatisfactory one could say. The committee took
no big decisions without calling the whole village together in a general
assembly. All this was wonderful." [Ronald Fraser, Blood of
Spain, p. 288]
Here are a few examples cited by Jose Peirats:
"In Montblanc the collective dug up the old useless vines and
planted new vineyards. The land, improved by modern cultivation
with tractors, yielded much bigger and better crops. . . . Many
Aragon collectives built new roads and repaired old ones, installed
modern flour mills, and processed agricultural and animal waste
into useful industrial products. Many of these improvements were
first initiated by the collectives. Some villages, like Calanda,
built parks and baths. Almost all collectives established libraries,
schools, and cultural centres." [cited The Anarchist Collectives,
p. 116]
Gaston Leval points out that "the Peasant Federation of Levant
. . . produced more than half of the total orange crop in Spain: almost
four million kilos (1 kilo equals about 2 and one-fourth pounds).
It then transported and sold through its own commercial organisation
(no middlemen) more than 70% of the crop. (The Federations's commercial
organisation included its own warehouses, trucks, and boats. Early
in 1938 the export section established its own agencies in France:
Marseilles, Perpignan, bordeaux, Cherbourg, and Paris.) Out of a total
of 47,000 hectares in all Spain devoted to rice production, the collective
in the Province of Valencia cultivated 30,000 hectares." [cited
in Ibid., p. 124]
To quote Peirats again:
"Preoccupation with cultural and pedagogical innovations was an event
without precedent in rural Spain. The Amposta collectivists organised
classes for semi-literates, kindergartens, and even a school of arts
and professions. The Seros schools were free to all neighbours,
collectivists or not. Grau installed a school named after its most
illustrious citizen, Joaquin Costa. The Calanda collective (pop.
only 4,500) schooled 1,233 children. The best students were sent to the
Lyceum in Caspe, with all expenses paid by the collective. The Alcoriza
(pop. 4,000) school was attended by 600 children. Many of the schools
were installed in abandoned convents. In Granadella (pop. 2,000), classes
were conducted in the abandoned barracks of the Civil Guards. Graus
organised a print library and a school of arts and professions, attended
by 60 pupils. The same building housed a school of fine arts and high
grade museum. In some villages a cinema was installed for the first
time. The Penalba cinema was installed in a church. Viladecana built an
experimental agricultural laboratory.
"The collectives voluntarily contributed enormous stocks of provisions and
other supplies to the fighting troops. Utiel sent 1,490 litres of
oil and 300 bushels of potatoes to the Madrid front (in addition
to huge stocks of beans, rice, buckwheat, etc.). Porales de Tujana
sent great quantities of bread, oil, flour, and potatoes to the
front, and eggs, meat, and milk to the military hospital.
"The efforts of the collectives take on added significance when
we take into account that their youngest and most vigorous workers
were fighting in the trenches. 200 members of the little collective
of Vilaboi were at the front; from Viledecans, 60; Amposta, 300;
and Calande, 500." [Ibid., pp. 116-120]
Peirats sums up the accomplishments of the agricultural collectives
as follows:
"In distribution the collectives' co-operatives eliminated middlemen,
small merchants, wholesalers, and profiteers, thus greatly reducing
consumer prices. The collectives eliminated most of the parasitic
elements from rural life, and would have wiped them out altogether
if they were not protected by corrupt officials and by the political
parties. Non-collectivised areas benefited indirectly from the
lower prices as well as from free services often rendered by the
collectives (laundries, cinemas, schools, barber and beauty parlours,
etc.)." [Ibid., p114]
Leval emphasises the following achievements (among others):
"In the agrarian collectives solidarity was practised to the greatest
degree. Not only was every person assured of the necessities, but the
district federations increasingly adopted the principle of mutual aid
on an inter-collective scale. For this purpose they created common
reserves to help out villages less favoured by nature. In Castile
special institutions for this purpose were created. In industry this
practice seems to have begun in Hospitalet, on the Catalan railways,
and was applied later in Alcoy. Had the political compromise not
impeded open socialisation, the practices of mutual aid would have
been much more generalised. . . A conquest of enormous importance
was the right of women to livelihood, regardless of occupation or
function. In about half of the agrarian collectives, the women
received the same wages as men; in the rest the women received
less, apparently on the principle that they rarely live alone. . .
In all the agrarian collectives of Aragon, Catalonia, Levant, Castile,
Andalusia, and Estremadura, the workers formed groups to divide the
labour or the land; usually they were assigned to definite areas.
Delegates elected by the work groups met with the collective's
delegate for agriculture to plan out the work. This typical
organisation arose quite spontaneously, by local initiative. . .
In addition . . . the collective as a whole met in weekly, bi-weekly
or monthly assembly . . . The assembly reviewed the activities of
the councillors it named, and discussed special cases and unforeseen
problems. All inhabitants -- men and women, producers and non-producers
-- took part in the discussion and decisions . . . In land cultivation
the most significant advances were: the rapidly increased use of
machinery and irrigation; greater diversification; and forestation.
In stock raising: the selection and multiplication of breeds; the
adaptation of breeds to local conditions; and large-scale
construction of collective stock barns." [Ibid., pp. 166-167]
Martha A. Ackelsberg sums up the experience well:
"The achievements of these collectives were extensive. In many
areas they maintained, if not increased, agricultural production
[not forgetting that many young men were at the front line], often
introducing new patterns of cultivation and fertilisation. . . collectivists
built chicken coups, barns, and other facilities for the care and
feeding of the community's animals. Federations of collectives co-ordinated
the construction of roads, schools, bridges, canals and dams. Some
of these remain to this day as lasting contributions of the collectives
to the infrastructure of rural Spain." [The Free Women of
Spain, p. 79]
She also points to inter-collective solidarity, noting that the
"collectivists also arranged for the transfer of surplus produce
from wealthier collectives to those experiencing shortages." [Ibid.]
Therefore, as well as significant economic achievements, the collectives
ensured social and political ones too. Solidarity was practised and
previously marginalised people took direct and full management of
the affairs of their communities, transforming them to meet their
own needs and desires.
No, it is not. The myth that the rural collectives were created by "terror,"
organised and carried out by the anarchist militia, was started by
the Stalinists of the Spanish Communist Party. More recently, some
right-wing Libertarians have warmed up and repeated these Stalinist
fabrications. Anarchists have been disproving these allegations since
1936 and it is worthwhile to do so again here.
As Vernon Richards notes, "[h]owever discredited Stalinism may
appear to be today the fact remains that the Stalinist lies and interpretation
of the Spanish Civil War still prevail, presumably because it suits
the political prejudices of those historians who are currently interpreting
it." [Introduction to Gaston Leval's Collectives in the Spanish
Revolution, p. 11] Here we shall present evidence to refute claims
that the rural collectives were created by force.
Firstly, we should point out that rural collectives were created
in many different areas of Spain, such as the Levant (900 collectives),
Castile (300) and Estremadera (30), where the anarchist militia did
not exist. In Catalonia, for example, the C.N.T. militia passed through
many villages on its way to Aragon and only around 40 collectives
were created unlike the 450 in Aragon. In other words, the rural collectivisation
process occurred independently of the existence of anarchist troops,
with the majority of the 1,700 rural collectives created in areas
without a predominance of anarchist troops.
One historian, Ronald Fraser, seems to imply that the Aragon Collectives
were imposed upon the Aragon population. As he puts it the "collectivisation,
carried out under the general cover, if not necessarily the direct
agency, of C.N.T. militia columns, represented a revolutionary minority's
attempt to control not only production but consumption for egalitarian
purposes and the needs of the war." [Blood of Spain, p.
370] Notice that he does not suggest that the anarchist militia actually
imposed the collectives, a claim for which there is little
or no evidence. Moreover, Fraser presents a somewhat contradictory
narrative to the facts he presents. On the one hand, he talks of a
policy of "obligatory" collectivistion imposed on the peasants
by the C.N.T., while on the other hand he presents extensive evidence
that the collectives did not have a 100% membership rate. How can
collectivisation be obligatory if people remain outside the collectives?
Similarly, he talks of how some C.N.T. militia leaders justified
forced collectivisation in terms of the war effort while acknowledging
the official C.N.T. policy of opposing forced collectivisation, an
opposition expressed in practice as only around 5% of the collectives
were total (and expressed in his own book as collectivists interviewed
continually note that people remained outside their collectives!).
Thus Fraser's attempts to paint the Aragon collectives as a form
of "war communism" imposed upon the population by the C.N.T.
and obligatory for all fails to co-incidence with the evidence he
presents.
Earlier he states that "[t]here was no need to dragoon them [the
peasants] at pistol point [into collectives]: the coercive climate,
in which 'fascists' were being shot, was sufficient. 'Spontaneous'
and 'forced' collectives existed, as did willing and unwilling collectivists
within them." [Op. Cit., p.349] Therefore, his suggestion
that the Aragon collectives were imposed upon the rural population
is based upon the insight that there was a "coercive climate"
in Aragon at the time. Of course a civil war against fascism would
produce a "coercive climate," particularly at the front line,
and so the C.N.T. can hardly be blamed for that. In addition, in a
life and death struggle against fascism, in which the fascists were
systematically murdering vast numbers of anarchists, socialists and
republicans in the areas under their control, it is hardly surprising
that some anarchist troops took the law into their own hands and murdered
some of those who supported and would help the fascists. Given what
was going on in fascist Spain, and the experience of fascism in Germany
and Italy, the C.N.T. militia knew exactly what would happen to them
and their friends and family if they lost.
The question does arise, however, of whether the climate was made
so coercive by the war and the nearness of the anarchist militia that
individual choice was impossible.
The facts speak for themselves -- rural collectivisation in Aragon
embraced more than 70% of the population in the area saved from fascism.
Around 30% of the population felt safe enough not to join a collective,
a sizeable percentage.
If the collectives had been created by anarchist terror or force,
we would expect a figure of 100% membership in the collectives. This
was not the case, indicating the basically voluntary nature of the
experiment (we should point out that other figures suggest a lower
number of collectivists which makes the forced collectivisation argument
even less likely). Historian Antony Beevor (while noting that there
"had undoubtedly been pressure, and no doubt force was used on
some occasions in the fervour after the rising") just stated the
obvious when he wrote that "the very fact that every village was
a mixture of collectivists and individualists shows that peasants
had not been forced into communal farming at the point of a gun."
[The Spanish Civil War, p. 206] In addition, if the C.N.T.
militia had forced peasants into collectives we would expect the membership
of the collectives to peak almost overnight, not grow slowly over
time. However, this is what happened:
"At the regional congress of collectives, held at Caspe in mid-February 1937,
nearly 80 000 collectivists were represented from 'almost all the villages
of the region.' This, however, was but a beginning. By the end of April
the number of collectivists had risen to 140 000; by the end of the first
week of May to 180 000; and by the end of June to 300 000." [Graham Kelsey,
"Anarchism in Aragon," pp. 60-82, Spain in Conflict 1931-1939,
Martin Blinkhorn (ed.), p. 61]
If the collectives had been created by force, then their membership
would have been 300 000 in February, 1937, not increasing steadily
to reach that number four months later. Neither can it be claimed
that the increase was due to new villages being collectivised, as
almost all villages had sent delegates in February. This indicates
that many peasants joined the collectives because of the advantages
associated with common labour, the increased resources it placed at
their hands and the fact that the surplus wealth which had in the
previous system been monopolised by the few was used instead to raise
the standard of living of the entire community.
The voluntary nature of the collectives is again emphasised by the
number of collectives which allowed smallholders to remain outside.
According to evidence Fraser presents (on page 366), an F.A.I. schoolteacher
is quoted as saying that the forcing of smallholders into the collective
"wasn't a widespread problem, because there weren't more than twenty
or so villages where collectivisation was total and no one was allowed
to remain outside..." Instead of forcing the minority in a village
to agree with the wishes of the majority, the vast majority (95%)
of Aragon collectives stuck to their libertarian principles and allowed
those who did not wish to join to remain outside.
So, only around 20 were "total" collectives (out of 450)
and around 30% of the population felt safe enough not to join.
In other words, in the vast majority of collectives those joining
could see that those who did not were safe. These figures should not
be discounted, as they give an indication of the basically spontaneous
and voluntary nature of the movement. As was the composition of the
new municipal councils created after July 19th. As Graham Kesley notes,
"[w]hat is immediately noticeable from the results is that although
the region has often been branded as one controlled by anarchists
to the total exclusion of all other forces, the C.N.T. was far from
enjoying the degree of absolute domination often implied and inferred."
[Anarchosyndicalism, Libertarian Communism and the State, p.
198]
In his account of the rural revolution, Burnett Bolloten notes that
it "embraced more than 70 percent of the population" in liberated
Aragon and that "many of the 450 collectives of the region were
largely voluntary" although "it must be emphasised that this
singular development was in some measure due to the presence of militiamen
from the neighbouring region of Catalonia, the immense majority of
whom were members of the C.N.T. and F.A.I." [The Spanish Civil
War, p. 74]
As Gaston Leval points out, "it is true that the presence of
these forces . . . favoured indirectly these constructive achievements
by preventing active resistance by the supporters of the bourgeois
republic and of fascism." [Collectives in the Spanish Revolution,
p. 90]
In other words, the presence of the militia changed the balance
of class forces in Aragon by destroying the capitalist state (i.e.
the local bosses - caciques - could not get state aid to protect their
property) and many landless workers took over the land. The presence
of the militia ensured that land could be taken over by destroying
the capitalist "monopoly of force" that existed before the
revolution (the power of which will be highlighted below) and so the
C.N.T. militia allowed the possibility of experimentation by the Aragonese
population.
This class war in the countryside is reflected by Bolloten's statement
that "[if] the individual farmer viewed with dismay the swift and
widespread collectivisation of agriculture, the farm workers of the
Anarchosyndicalist C.N.T. and the Socialist UGT saw it as the commencement
of a new era." [The Spanish Civil War, p. 63] Both were
mass organisations and supported collectivisation.
Therefore, anarchist militia allowed the rural working class to
abolish the artificial scarcity of land created by private property
(and enforced by the state). The rural bosses obviously viewed with
horror the possibility that they could not exploit day workers' labour.
As Bolloten points out "the collective system of agriculture threaten[ed]
to drain the rural labour market of wage workers." [Op. Cit.,
p. 62] Little wonder the richer peasants and landowners hated the
collectives.
Bolloten also quotes a report on the district of Valderrobes which
indicates popular support for the collectives:
"Collectivisation was nevertheless opposed by opponents on the right and
adversaries on the left. If the eternally idle who have been expropriated
had been asked what they thought of collectivisation, some would have
replied that it was robbery and others a dictatorship. But, for the
elderly, the day workers, the tenant farmers and small proprietors who
had always been under the thumb of the big landowners and heartless
usurers, it appeared as salvation" [Op. Cit., p. 71]
However, most historians ignore the differences in class that existed
in the countryside. They ignore it and explain the rise in collectives
in Aragon (and ignore those elsewhere) as the result of the C.N.T.
militia. Fraser, for example, states that "[v]ery rapidly collectives
. . . began to spring up. It did not happen on instructions from the
C.N.T. leadership -- no more than had the [industrial] collectives
in Barcelona. Here, as there, the initiative came from C.N.T. militants;
here, as there, the 'climate' for social revolution in the rearguard
was created by C.N.T. armed strength: the anarcho-syndicalists' domination
of the streets of Barcelona was re-enacted in Aragon as the C.N.T.
militia columns, manned mainly by Catalan anarcho-syndicalist workers,
poured in. Where a nucleus of anarcho-syndicalists existed in a village,
it seized the moment to carry out the long-awaited revolution and
collectivised spontaneously. Where there was none, villagers could
find themselves under considerable pressure from the militias to collectivise.
. ." [Op. Cit., p. 347]
In other words, he implies that the revolution was mostly imported
into Aragon from Catalonia. However, the majority of C.N.T. column
leaders were opposed to the setting up of the Council of Aragon (a
confederation for the collectives) [Fraser, Op. Cit., p. 350].
Hardly an example of Catalan C.N.T. imposed social revolution. The
evidence we have suggests that the Aragon C.N.T. was a widespread
and popular organisation, suggesting that the idea that the collectives
were imported into Aragon by the Catalan C.N.T. is simply false.
Fraser states that in "some [of the Aragonese villages] there
was a flourishing C.N.T., in others the UGT was strongest, and in
only too many there was no unionisation at all." [Blood of
Spain, p. 348] The question arises of how extensive was that strength.
The evidence we have suggests that it was extensive, strong and growing,
so indicating that rural Aragon was not without a C.N.T. base, a base
that makes the suggestion of imposed collectives a false one.
Murray Bookchin summarises the strength of the C.N.T. in rural Aragon
as follows:
"The authentic peasant base of the C.N.T. [by the 1930s] now lay in Aragon
. . .[C.N.T. growth in Zaragoza] provided a springboard for a highly
effective libertarian agitation in lower Aragon, particularly among
the impoverished labourers and debt-ridden peasantry of the dry steppes
region." [The Spanish Anarchists, p. 203]
Graham Kelsey, in his social history of the C.N.T. in Aragon between
1930 and 1937, provides the necessary evidence to more than back Bookchin's
claim of C.N.T. growth. Kesley points out that as well as the "spread
of libertarian groups and the increasing consciousness among C.N.T.
members of libertarian theories . . .contribu[ting] to the growth
of the anarchosyndicalist movement in Aragon" the existence of
"agrarian unrest" also played an important role in that growth
[Anarchosyndicalism, Libertarian Communism and the State, pp.
80-81]. This all lead to the "revitalisation of the C.N.T. network
in Aragon" [p. 82] and so by 1936, the C.N.T. had built upon the
"foundations laid in 1933. . . [and] had finally succeeded in translating
the very great strength of the urban trade-union organisation in Zaragoza
into a regional network of considerable extent." [Op. Cit.,
p. 134]
Kelsey and other historians note the long history of anarchism in
Aragon, dating back to the late 1860s. However, before the 1910s there
had been little gains in rural Aragon by the C.N.T. due to the power
of local bosses (called caciques):
"Local landowners and small industrialists, the caciques of provincial
Aragon, made every effort to enforce the closure of these first rural
anarchosyndicalist cells [created after 1915]. By the time of the first
rural congress of the Aragonese C.N.T. confederation in the summer of 1923,
much of the progress achieved through the organisation's considerable
propaganda efforts had been countered by repression elsewhere."
[Graham Kelsey, "Anarchism in Aragon," p. 62]
A C.N.T. activist indicates the power of these bosses and how difficult
it was to be a union member in Aragon:
"Repression is not the same in the large cities as it is in the villages
where everyone knows everybody else and where the Civil Guards are
immediately notified of a comrade's slightest movement. Neither friends
nor relatives are spared. All those who do not serve the state's repressive
forces unconditionally are pursued, persecuted and on occasions beaten
up." [cited by Kelsey, Op. Cit., p. 74]
However, while there were some successes in organising rural unions,
even in 1931 "propaganda campaigns which led to the establishment
of scores of village trade-union cells, were followed by a counter-offensive
from village caciques which forced them to close." [Ibid.
p. 67] But even in the face of this repression the C.N.T. grew and
"from the end of 1932. . . [there was] a successful expansion of
the anarchosyndicalist movement into several parts of the region where
previously it had never penetrated." [Kesley, Anarchosyndicalism,
Libertarian Communism and the State, p. 185]
This growth was built upon in 1936, with increased rural activism
which had slowly eroded the power of the caciques (which in
part explains their support for the fascist coup). After the election
of the Popular Front, years of anarchist propaganda and organisation
paid off with a massive increase in rural membership in the C.N.T.:
"The dramatic growth in rural anarcho-syndicalist support in the six
weeks since the general election was emphasised in the [Aragon C.N.T.'s
April] congress's agenda. . . the congress directed its attention
to rural problems . . . [and agreed a programme which was] exactly
what was to happen four months later in liberated Aragon." [Kesley,
"Anarchism in Aragon", p. 76]
In the aftermath of a regional congress, held in Zaragoza at the
start of April, a series of intensive propaganda campaigns was organised
through each of the provinces of the regional confederation. Many
meetings were held in villages which had never before heard anarcho-
syndicalist propaganda. This was very successful and by the beginning
of June, 1936, the number of Aragon unions had topped 400, compared
to only 278 one month earlier (an increase of over 40% in 4 weeks).
[Ibid., pp. 75-76]
This increase in union membership reflects increased social struggle
by the Aragonese working population and their attempts to improve
their standard of living, which was very low for most of the population.
A journalist from the conservative-Catholic Heraldo de Aragon
visited lower Aragon in the summer of 1935 and noted "[t]he hunger
in many homes, where the men are not working, is beginning to encourage
the youth to subscribe to misleading teachings." [cited by Kesley,
Ibid., p. 74]
Little wonder, then, the growth in C.N.T. membership and social
struggle Kesley indicates:
"Evidence of a different kind was also available that militant trade
unionism in Aragon was on the increase. In the five months between
mid-February and mid-July 1936 the province of Zaragoza experienced
over seventy strikes, more than had previously been recorded in any
entire year, and things were clearly no different in the other two
provinces . . . the great majority of these strikes were occurring in
provincial towns and villages. Strikes racked the provinces and in at
least three instances were actually transformed into general strikes."
[Ibid., p. 76]
Therefore, in the spring and summer of 1936, we see a massive growth
in C.N.T. membership which reflects growing militant struggle by the
urban and rural population of Aragon. Years of C.N.T. propaganda and
organising had ensured this growth in C.N.T. influence, a growth which
is also reflected in the creation of collectives in liberated Aragon
during the revolution. Therefore, the construction of a collectivised
society was founded directly upon the emergence, during the five years
of the Second Republic, of a mass trade-union movement infused by
libertarian, anarchist principles. These collectives were constructed
in accordance with the programme agreed at the Aragon C.N.T. conference
of April 1936 which reflected the wishes of the rural membership of
the unions within Aragon (and due to the rapid growth of the C.N.T.
afterwards obviously reflected popular feelings in the area).
In the words of Graham Kesley, "libertarian dominance in post-insurrection
Aragon itself reflected the predominance that anarchists had secured
before the war; by the summer of 1936 the C.N.T. had succeeded in
establishing throughout Aragon a mass trade-union movement of strictly
libertarian orientation, upon which widespread and well-supported
network the extensive collective experiment was to be founded."
[Ibid., p. 61]
Additional evidence that supports a high level of C.N.T. support
in rural Aragon can be provided by the fact that it was Aragon that
was the centre of the December 1933 insurrection organised by the
C.N.T. As Bookchin notes, "only Aragon rose on any significant
scale, particularly Saragossa . . . many of the villages declared
libertarian communism and perhaps the heaviest fighting took place
between the vineyard workers in Rioja and the authorities" [M.
Bookchin, Op. Cit., p. 238]
It is unlikely for the C.N.T. to organise an insurrection in an
area within which it had little support or influence. According to
Kesley's in-depth social history of Aragon, "it was precisely those
areas which had most important in December 1933 . . . which were now
[in 1936], in seeking to create a new pattern of economic and social
organisation, to form the basis of libertarian Aragon." [G. Kesley,
Anarchosyndicalism, Libertarian Communism and the State, p.
161] After the revolt, thousands of workers were jailed, with the
authorities having to re-open closed prisons and turn at least one
disused monastery into a jail due to the numbers arrested.
Therefore, it can be seen that the majority of collectives in Aragon
were the product of C.N.T. (and UGT) influenced workers taking the
opportunity to create a new form of social life, a form marked by
its voluntary and directly democratic nature. For from being unknown
in rural Aragon, the C.N.T. was well established and growing at a
fast rate - "Spreading out from its urban base... the C.N.T., first
in 1933 and then more extensively in 1936, succeeded in converting
an essentially urban organisation into a truly regional confederation."
[Ibid., p. 184]
Therefore the evidence suggests that historians like Fraser are
wrong to imply that the Aragon collectives were created by the C.N.T.
militia and enforced upon a unwilling population. The Aragon collectives
were the natural result of years of anarchist activity within rural
Aragon and directly related to the massive growth in the C.N.T. between
1930 and 1936. Thus Kesley is correct to state that:
"Libertarian communism and agrarian collectivisation were not economic
terms or social principles enforced upon a hostile population by special
teams of urban anarchosyndicalists . . ." [G. Kesley, Op. Cit., p. 161]
This is not to suggest that there were no examples of people
joining collectives involuntarily because of the "coercive climate"
of the front line. And, of course, there were villages which did not
have a C.N.T. union within them before the war and so created a collective
because of the existence of the C.N.T. militia. But these can be considered
as exceptions to the rule.
Moreover, the way the C.N.T. handled such a situation is noteworthy.
Fraser indicates such a situation in the village of Alloza. In the
autumn of 1936, representatives of the C.N.T. district committee had
come to suggest that the villagers collectivise (we would like to
stress here that the C.N.T. militia which had passed through the village
had made no attempt to create a collective there).
A village assembly was called and the C.N.T. explained their ideas
and suggested how to organise the collective. However, who would join
and how the villagers would organise the collective was left totally
up to them (the C.N.T. representatives "stressed that no one was
to be maltreated"). Within the collective, self-management was
the rule.
According to one member, "[o]nce the work groups were established
on a friendly basis and worked their own lands, everyone got on well
enough," he recalled. "There was no need for coercion, no need
for discipline and punishment. . . A collective wasn't a bad idea
at all." [Op. Cit., p. 360] This collective, like the vast
majority, was voluntary and democratic - "I couldn't oblige him
to join; we weren't living under a dictatorship." [Op. Cit.,
p. 362] In other words, no force was used to create the collective
and the collective was organised by local people directly.
Of course, as with any public good (to use economic jargon), all
members of the community had to pay for the war effort and feed the
militia. As Kesely notes, "[t]he military insurrection had come
at a critical moment in the agricultural calendar. Throughout lower
Aragon there were fields of grain ready for harvesting. . . At the
assembly in Albalate de Cinca the opening clause of the agreed programme
had required everyone in the district, independent farmers and collectivists
alike, to contribute equally to the war effort, thereby emphasising
one of the most important considerations in the period immediately
following the rebellion."
In addition, the collectives controlled the price of crops in order
to ensure that speculation and inflation were controlled. However,
these policies as with the equal duties of individualists and collectivists
in the war effort were enforced upon the collectives by the war.
Lastly, in support of the popular nature of the rural collectives,
we will indicate the effects of the suppression of the collectives
in August 1937 by the Communists, namely the collapse of the rural
economy. This sheds considerable light on the question of popular
attitudes to the collectives.
In October, the Communist-controlled Regional Delegation of Agrarian
Reform acknowledged that "in the majority of villages agricultural
work was paralysed causing great harm to our agrarian economy."
This is confirmed by Jose Silva, a Communist Party member and general
secretary of the Institute of Agrarian Reform, who commented that
after Lister had attacked Aragon, "labour in the fields was suspended
almost entirely, and a quarter of the land had not been prepared at
the time for sowing." At a meeting of the agrarian commission
of the Aragonese Communist Party (October 9th, 1937), Jose Silva emphasised
"the little incentive to work of the entire peasant population"
and that the situation brought about by the dissolution of the collectives
was "grave and critical." [quoted by Bolloten, Op. Cit.,
p. 530]
Jose Peirats explains the reasons for this economic collapse as
a result of popular boycott:
"When it came time to prepare for the next harvest, smallholders could
not by themselves work the property on which they had been installed
[by the communists]. Dispossessed peasants, intransigent collectivists,
refused to work in a system of private property, and were even less
willing to rent out their labour." [Anarchists in the Spanish
Revolution, p. 258]
If the collectives were unpopular, created by anarchist force, then
why did the economy collapse after the suppression? If Lister had
overturned a totalitarian anarchist regime, why did the peasants not
reap the benefit of their toil? Could it be because the collectives
were essentially a spontaneous Aragonese development and supported
by most of the population there? This analysis is backed up by Yaacov
Oved's statement (from a paper submitted to the XII Congress of Sociology,
Madrid, July 1990):
"Those who were responsible for this policy [of "freeing" the Aragon
Collectivists], were convinced that the farmers would greet it joyfully
because they had been coerced into joining the collectives. But they were
proven wrong. Except for the rich estate owners who were glad to get their
land back, most of the members of the agricultural collectives objected and
lacking all motivation they were reluctant to resume the same effort of in the
agricultural work. This phenomenon was so widespread that the authorities and
the communist minister of agriculture were forced to retreat from their
hostile policy." [Yaacov Oved, Communismo Libertario and Communalism in
the Spanish Collectivisations (1936-1939)]
Even in the face of Communist repression, most of the collectives
kept going. This, if nothing else, proves that the collectives were
popular institutions. As Yaacov Oved argues in relation to the breaking
up of the collectives:
"Through the widespread reluctance of collectivists to co-operate with the
new policy it became evident that most members had voluntarily joined the
collectives and as soon as the policy was changed a new wave of collectives
was established. However, the wheel could not be turned back. An atmosphere
of distrust prevailed between the collectives and the authorities and
every initiative was curtailed" [Op. Cit.]
Jose Peirats sums up the situation after the communist attack on
the collectives and the legalisation of the collectives as follows:
"It is very possible that this second phase of collectivisation better
reflects the sincere convictions of the members. They had undergone a
sever test and those who had withstood it were proven collectivists. Yet
it would be facile to label as anti-collectivists those who abandoned
the collectives in this second phase. Fear, official coercion and
insecurity weighed heavily in the decisions of much of the Aragonese
peasantry." [Op. Cit., p. 258]
While the collectives had existed, there was a 20% increase in production
(and this is compared to the pre-war harvest which had been "a
good crop." [Fraser, p. 370]); after the destruction of the collectives,
the economy collapsed. Hardly the result that would be expected if
the collectives were forced upon an unwilling peasantry. The forced
collectivisation by Stalin in Russia resulted in a famine. Only the
victory of fascism made it possible to restore the so-called "natural
order" of capitalist property in the Spanish countryside. The
same land-owners who welcomed the Communist repression of the collectives
also, we are sure, welcomed the fascists who ensured a lasting victory
of property over liberty.
So, overall, the evidence suggests that the Aragon collectives,
like their counterparts in the Levante, Catalonia and so on, were
popular organisations, created by and for the rural population
and, essentially, an expression of a spontaneous and popular social
revolution. Claims that the anarchist militia created them by force
of arms are false. While acts of violence did occur
and some acts of coercion did take place (against C.N.T. policy,
we may add) these are the exceptions to the rule. Bolloten's summary
best fits the facts:
"But in spite of the cleavages between doctrine and practice that plagued
the Spanish Anarchists whenever they collided with the realities of power,
it cannot be overemphasised that notwithstanding the many instances of
coercion and violence, the revolution of July 1936 distinguished itself
from all others by the generally spontaneous and far-reaching character of
its collectivist movement and by its promise of moral and spiritual
renewal. Nothing like this spontaneous movement had ever occurred before."
[Op. Cit., p. 78]
Yes. In contradiction to the old capitalist claim that no one will innovate
unless private property exists, the workers and peasants exhibited
much more incentive and creativity under libertarian socialism than
they had under the private enterprise system. This is apparent from
Gaston Leval's description of the results of collectivisation in Cargagente:
"Carcagente is situated in the southern part of the province of Valencia.
The climate of the region is particularly suited for the cultivation of
oranges. . . . All of the socialised land, without exception, is cultivated
with infinite care. The orchards are thoroughly weeded. To assure that
the trees will get all the nourishment needed, the peasants are
incessantly cleaning the soil. 'Before,' they told me with pride, 'all
this belonged to the rich and was worked by miserably paid labourers. The
land was neglected and the owners had to buy immense quantities of
chemical fertilisers, although they could have gotten much better yields
by cleaning the soil. . . .' With pride, they showed me trees that had
been grafted to produce better fruit.
"In many places I observed plants growing in the shade of the orange trees.
'What is this?,' I asked. I learned that the Levant peasants (famous
for their ingenuity) have abundantly planted potatoes among the
orange groves. The peasants demonstrate more intelligence than all
the bureaucrats in the Ministry of Agriculture combined. They do
more than just plant potatoes. Throughout the whole region of the
Levant, wherever the soil is suitable, they grow crops. They take
advantage of the four month [fallow period] in the rice fields.
Had the Minister of Agriculture followed the example of these peasants
throughout the Republican zone, the bread shortage problem would
have been overcome in a few months." [cited in Dolgoff, Anarchist
Collectives, p. 153]
This is just one from a multitude of examples presented in the accounts
of both the industrial and rural collectives (for more see section
C.2.3 in which we present more examples to refute that charge
that "workers' control would stifle innovation" and I.8.6).
The available evidence proves that the membership of the collectives
showed a keen awareness of the importance of investment and innovation
in order to increase production and to make work both lighter and
more interesting and that the collectives allowed that awareness
to be expressed freely. The Spanish collectives indicate that, given
the chance, everyone will take an interest in their own affairs and
express a desire to use their minds to improve their surroundings.
In fact, capitalism distorts what innovation exists under hierarchy
by channelling it purely in how to save money and maximise investor
profit, ignoring other, more important, issues.
As Gaston Leval argues, self-management encouraged innovation:
"The theoreticians and partisans of the liberal economy affirm that
competition stimulates initiative and, consequently, the creative spirit
and invention without which it remains dormant. Numerous observations made
by the writer in the Collectives, factories and socialised workshops permit
him to take quite the opposite view. For in a Collective, in a grouping
where each individual is stimulated by the wish to be of service to his
fellow beings research, the desire for technical perfection and so on
are also stimulated. But they also have as a consequence that other
individuals join those who were first to get together. Furthermore, when,
in present society, an individualist inventor discovers something, it is
used only by the capitalist or the individual employing him, whereas in
the case of an inventor living in a community not only is his discovery
taken up and developed by others, but is immediately applied for the
common good. I am convinced that this superiority would very soon manifest
itself in a socialised society." [Collectives in the Spanish Revolution,
p. 247]
Therefore the actual experiences of self-management in Spain supports
the points made in section I.4.11.
Freed from hierarchy, individuals will creatively interact with the
world to improve their circumstances. This is not due to "market forces"
but because the human mind is an active agent and unless crushed by
authority it can no more stop thinking and acting than the Earth stop
revolving round the Sun. In addition, the Collectives indicate that
self-management allows ideas to be enriched by discussion, as Bakunin
argued:
"The greatest intelligence would not be equal to a comprehension of the
whole. Thence results... the necessity of the division and association
of labour. I receive and I give - such is human life. Each directs and
is directed in his turn. Therefore there is no fixed and constant
authority, but a continual exchange of mutual, temporary, and, above all,
voluntary authority and subordination" [God and the State, p. 33]
The experience of self-management proved Bakunin's point that society
is more intelligent than even the most intelligent individual simply
because of the wealth of viewpoints, experience and thoughts contained
there. Capitalism impoverishes individuals and society by its artificial
boundaries and authority structures.
Just because something is good does not mean that it will survive.
For example, the Warsaw Ghetto uprising against the Nazis failed
but that does not mean that the uprising was a bad cause or that the
Nazi regime was correct, far from it. Similarly, while the experiments
in workers' self-management and communal living undertaken across
Republican Spain is one of the most important social experiments in
a free society ever undertaken, this cannot change the fact that Franco's
forces and the Communists had access to more and better weapons.
Faced with the aggression and terrorism of Franco, and behind him
the military might of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, the treachery
of the Communists, and the aloofness of the Western bourgeois "republics"
(whose policy of "non-intervention" was strangely ignored when
their citizens aided Franco) it is amazing the revolution lasted as
long as it did.
This does not excuse the actions of the anarchists themselves. As
is well known, the C.N.T. co-operated with the other anti-fascist
parties and trade unions on the Republican side (see next
section). This co-operation lead to the C.N.T. joining the anti-fascist
government and "anarchists" becoming ministers of state. This co-operation,
more than anything, helped ensure the defeat of the revolution. While
much of the blame can be places at the door of the would-be "leaders,"
who like most leaders started to think themselves irreplaceable and
spokespersons for the organisations there were members of, it must
be stated that the rank-and-file of the movement did little to stop
them. Most of the militant anarchists were at the front-line (and
so excluded from union and collective meetings) and so could not influence
their fellow workers (it is no surprise that the "Friends of Durruti"
group were mostly ex-militia men). However, it seems that the mirage
of anti-fascist unity proved too much for the majority of C.N.T. members
(see section I.8.12).
Some anarchists still maintain that the Spanish anarchist movement
had no choice and that collaboration (while having unfortunate eeffects)
was the only choice available. This view was defended by Sam Dolgoff
and finds some support in the writings of Gaston Leval, August Souchy
and many other anarchists. However, most anarchists today oppose collaboration
and think it was a terrible mistake (at the time, this position was
held by the majority of non-Spanish anarchists plus a large minority
of the Spanish movement, becoming a majority as the implications of
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