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[[File:CNT-FAI.jpg|thumbnail|Poster from the 1930s. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism_in_Spain#mediaviewer/File:CNT_-_La_Barrera_Inexpugnable.jpg]]
[[File:CNT-FAI.jpg|thumbnail|Poster from the 1930s. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism_in_Spain#mediaviewer/File:CNT_-_La_Barrera_Inexpugnable.jpg]]


From Peter Gelderloos, [[Anarchy Works]]:
During the 1936-9 Spanish Civil War, anarchists coordinated thousands of horizontally-run communities, factories and farms, especially in the regions of Catalonia, Aragon, and the Levant. Frank Mintz estimates that the anarchist collectives encompassed 610,000 to 800,000 workers, or 3,200,000 people including their families. Gaston Leval, a French anarchist who fought in the war, describes a "revolutionary experience involving, directly or indirectly, 7 to 8 million people."<ref>Sam Dolgoff, ''The Anarchist Collectives: Workers’ Self-Management in the Spanish Revolution, 1936–1939, Anarchist Library, http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/sam-dolgoff-editor-the-anarchist-collectives. 104, 40</ref>.
<blockquote>
One of the most well known anarchist histories is that of the Spanish Civil War. In July 1936, General Franco launched a fascist coup in Spain. From the standpoint of the elite, it was a necessary act; the nation’s military officers, landowners, and religious hierarchy were terrified by growing anarchist and socialist movements. The monarchy had already been abolished, but the workers and peasants were not content with representative democracy. The coup did not go smoothly. While in many areas Spain’s Republican government rolled over easily and resigned itself to fascism, the anarchist labor union (CNT) and other anarchists working autonomously formed militias, seized arsenals, stormed barracks, and defeated trained troops. Anarchists were especially strong in Catalunya, Aragon, Asturias, and much of Andalucia. Workers also defeated the coup in Madrid and Valencia, where the socialists were strong, and in much of the Basque country. In the anarchist areas, the government effectively ceased to function.


In these stateless areas of the Spanish countryside in 1936, peasants organized themselves according to principles of communism, collectivism, or mutualism according to their preferences and local conditions. They formed thousands of collectives, especially in Aragon, Catalunya, and Valencia. Some abolished all money and private property; some organized quota systems to ensure that everyone’s needs were met. The diversity of forms they developed is a testament to the freedom they created themselves. Where once all these villages were mired in the same stifling context of feudalism and developing capitalism, within months of overthrowing government authority and coming together in village assemblies, they gave birth to hundreds of different systems, united by common values like solidarity and self-organization. And they developed these different forms by holding open assemblies and making decisions about their future in common.
The 1.5 million-member anarcho-syndicalist National Confederation of Labor (CNT) and the 300,000-member Anarchist Federation of Iberia (FAI) coordinated the anarchist collectives and organized militias to defend them. Because of their close collaboration, writers often abbreviate the two organizations together as CNT-FAI.


The town of Magdalena de Pulpis, for example, abolished money completely. One inhabitant reported, “Everyone works and everyone has the right to what he needs free of charge. He simply goes to the store where provisions and all other necessities are supplied. Everything is distributed free with only a notation of what he took.”<ref>Sam Dolgoff, The Anarchist Collectives, New York: Free Life Editions, 1974, p. 73.</ref> Recording what everyone took allowed the community to distribute resources equally in times of scarcity, and generally ensured accountability.
The Spanish Civil War pitted Fransisco Franco's fascists against an alliance of anarchists, Communists, Socialists and Republicans. Within the anti-fascist side, anarchists faced severe repression from the Communists and Republicans; in May of 1937, the Communists attacked anarchists in Barcelona, sounding "the death-knell of the revolution” according to Broué and Témime.<ref>Noam Chomsky, “Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship” in ''The Chomsky Reader'' (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987), 102.</ref> However, collectives retained various degrees of power throughout the civil war, and Sam Dolgoff refers to “the Spanish Revolution of 1936-1939.”<ref> Dolgoff, ''The Anarchist Collectives,'' 39.</ref>


Other collectives worked out their own systems of exchange. They issued local money in the form of vouchers, tokens, rationing booklets, certificates, and coupons which carried no interest and were not negotiable outside of the issuing collective. Communities that had suppressed money paid workers in coupons according to the size of the family — a “family wage” based on the needs of the family rather than the productivity of its working members. Abundant local goods like bread, wine, and olive oil were distributed freely, while other items “could be obtained by means of coupons at the communal depot. Surplus goods were exchanged with other anarchist towns and villages.”<ref>Ditto, p. 73. The statistic on Graus comes from p. 140.</ref> There was much experimentation with new monetary systems. In Aragon, there were hundreds of different kinds of coupon and money systems, so the Aragon Federation of Peasant Collectives unanimously decided to replace local currencies with a standard ration booklet — though each collective retained the power to decide how goods would be distributed and the amount of coupons workers would receive.
[[File:Anarchist Spain.png|thumbnail|Anarchist Spain. From Sam Dolgoff's ''The Anarchist Collectives'']]


All the collectives, once they had taken control of their villages, organized open mass assemblies to discuss problems and plan how to organize themselves. Decisions were made via voting or consensus. Village assemblies generally met between once a week and once a month; foreign observers surveying them remarked that participation was broad and enthusiastic. Many of the collectivized villages joined with other collectives in order to pool resources, aid one another, and arrange trade. The collectives in Aragon donated hundreds of tons of food to the volunteer militias who were holding back the fascists on the front, and also took in large numbers of refugees who had fled the fascists. The town of Graus, for example, with a population of 2,600, took in and supported 224 refugees, only 20 of whom could work.


At assemblies, collectives discussed problems and proposals. Many collectives elected administrative committees, generally consisting of half a dozen people, to manage affairs until the next meeting. The open assemblies:
=Culture=


The journalist George Orwell, who fought in the civil war with the Marxist POUM militia, describes anarchist-held Catalonia in 1936 as a site of a far-reaching cultural transformation:
<blockquote>
<blockquote>
It was the first time I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workmen. Every shop and café had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized; even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said 'Señor' or 'Don' or even 'Usted'; everyone called everyone else 'Comrade' and 'Thou,' and said 'Salud!' instead of 'Buenos dias.' Tipping had been forbidden by law since the time of Primo de Rivera; almost my first experience was receiving a lecture from an hotel manager for trying to tip a lift-boy. There were no private motor cars, they had all been commandered, and all the trams and taxis and much of the other transport were painted red and black. The revolutionary posters were everywhere, flaming from the walls in clean reds and blues that made the few remaining advertisements look like daubs of mud. Down the Ramblas, the wide central artery of the town where crowds of people streamed constantly to and fro, the loud-speakers were bellowing revolutionary songs all day and far into the night. And it was the aspect of the crowds that was the queerest thing of all. In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist. Except for a small number of women and foreigners there were no 'well-dressed' people at all. Practically everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue overalls or some variant of the militia uniform. All this was queer and moving. There was much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.”<ref>George Orwell, ''Homage to Catalonia'' (USA: Harcourt, Inc., 1980), 4-5.</ref>
</blockquote>


allowed the inhabitants to know, to so understand, and to feel so mentally integrated in society, to so participate in the management of public affairs, in the responsibilities, that the recriminations, the tensions which always occur when the power of decision is entrusted to a few individuals... did not happen there. The assemblies were public, the objections, the proposals publicly discussed, everybody being free, as in the syndical assemblies, to participate in the discussions, to criticize, propose, etc. Democracy extended to the whole of social life. In most cases even the individualists [locals who had not joined the collective] could take part in the deliberations. They were given the same hearing as the collectivists.<ref>Gaston Leval, Collectives in the Spanish Revolution, London: Freedom Press, 1975, pp. 206–207.</ref>
In May 1936, anarchist women formed the group Mujeres Libres, meaning “Free Women,” advocating an end to sexism and all other forms of domination. They struggled for rights to contraception, abortion and divorce. Membership rose to 30,000 over the two years of the group's existence. They established a women's college in Barcelona, maternity hospitals, and schools for children. Women initially fought in the anarchist militias, but the Republican government ordered women to leave the frontlines in November of 1936.<ref>Connor McLaughlin, “Free Women of Spain,” http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/ws/spain48.html.</ref> Peter Marshall describes some limitations of women's liberation in revolutionary Spain:


<blockquote>
The liberation of women, however, was only partial: they were often paid a lower rate than men in the collective; they continued to perform 'women's work'; they saw the struggle primarily in terms of class and not sex. But in a traditionally Catholic and patriarchal society, there were undoubtedly new possibilities for women and they appeared unaccompanied in public for the first time with a new self-assurance. <ref>Peter Marshall, ''Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism'' (London: Harper Perennial, 2008).</ref>
</blockquote>
</blockquote>


If not every village inhabitant was a member of the collective, there might be a municipal council in addition to the collective assembly, so that no one would be excluded from decision-making.
In its 1936 Saragossa program, the anarcho-syndicalist CNT agreed to support and send supplies to people with a broad variety of lifestyles, including those who wished to live as naturalists, nudists and non-industrialists. Daniel Guérin comments, “Does this make us smile? On the eve of a vast, blood, social transformation, the CNT did not think it foolish to try to meet the infinitely varied aspirations of individual human beings.”<ref>Daniel Guérin, ''Anarchism: From Theory to Practice'' (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970).</ref>
 
=Decisions=
 
==Aragon==
 
In rural Aragon, collectivized towns implemented what Gaston Leval calls “libertarian democracy,” based on majority vote. Local decision-making assemblies met weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly depending on the town. Leval remarked that these assemblies “would not last more than a few hours. They dealt with concrete, precise subjects concretely and precisely. And all who had something to say could express themselves.”
 
Leval describes an assembly he attended in Huesca, Aragon. About 500 people attended, including 100 women. One agenda item involved residents who had left the collective. These “individualists” needed bread and wanted to take one of the collective's bakeries for themselves. After discussing several possible responses, the town assembly decided to keep the bakery but to bake extra bread for the individualists, on the condition that they supplied their own flour. <ref> Gaston Leval, “Libertarian Democracy” in ''Collectives in the Spanish Revolution'', Libcom.org, http://libcom.org/library/collectives-spanish-revolution-gaston-leval </ref>
 
==Catalonia==
The Republican government of industrial Catalonia effectively collapsed in July 1936, when the anarchists successfully defended the region from Franco's attack. After the battle, the CNT-FAI “seized post offices and telephone exchanges, formed police squads and militia units in Barcelona and in other towns and villages of Catalonia, and through their dominion over most of the economic life in the region.” The liberal historian Burnett Bolloten writes that the “practical significance” of the Catalan government “all but disappeared in the whirlwind of the Revolution.”<ref>Burnett Bolloten, ''The Spanish Civil War: Revolution and Counterrevolution'' (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). https://libcom.org/library/spanish-civil-war-revolution-counterrevolution-burnett-bolloten.</ref> Chomsky concurs, “In Catalonia, the bourgeois government headed by Luis Companys retained nominal authority, but real power was in the hands of the anarchist-dominated communities.”<ref>Chomsky, “Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship”</ref>


In many collectives they agreed that if a member violated a collective rule once, he was reprimanded. If it happened a second time, he was referred to the general assembly. Only the general assembly could expel a member from the collective; delegates and administrators were denied punitive power. The power of the general assembly to respond to transgressions was also used to prevent people who had been delegated tasks from being irresponsible or authoritarian; delegates or elected administrators who failed to abide by collective decisions or usurped authority were suspended or removed by a general vote. In some villages that were split between anarchists and socialists, the peasants formed two collectives side by side, to allow for different ways of making and enforcing decisions rather than imposing one method on everybody.
Catalonia's president Luis Companys convinced the anarchists to establish the independent but proto-statist Central Anti-Fascist Militia Committee, which included representatives from the anarchist groups and other anti-fascists. According to the Bolloten, the Committee “immediately became the de facto executive body in the region. Its power rested not on the shattered machinery of state but on the revolutionary milita and police squads and upon the multitudinous committees that sprang up in the region during the first days of the Revolution.”<ref> Bolloten, ''The Spanish Civil War”.</ref> Tom Wetzel argues that the Central Anti-Fascist Militia Committee “was not an organ of working class 'dual power.' The Popular Front leaders in fact controlled the committee, just like the government.” Of the committee's 15 seats, the CNT and FAI together only held five. Although the CNT had three times the Socialist UGT's membership, both organizations had 3 seats.<ref>Tom Wetzel, “Workers Power and the Spanish Revolution”. https://libcom.org/library/workers-power-and-the-spanish-revolution-tom-wetzel.</ref>


Gaston Leval described a general assembly in the village of Tamarite de Litera, in Huesca province, which the non-collective peasants were also allowed to attend. One problem brought up at the meeting was that several peasants who had not joined the collective left their elderly parents in the care of the collective while taking their parents’ land to farm as their own. The entire group discussed the matter, and eventually decided to adopt a specific proposal: they would not kick the elderly parents out of the collective, but they wanted to hold those peasants accountable, so they decided that the latter had to take care of their parents or else receive neither solidarity nor land from the collective. In the end, a resolution agreed to by an entire community will carry more legitimacy, and is more likely to be followed, than one handed down by a specialist or a government official.
==FAI==


Important decisions also took place at work in the fields every day:
The Anarchist Federation of Iberia (FAI) “formed a near-model of libertarian organization,” according to Murray Bookchin. Its basic political unit was the ''affinity group'':


<blockquote>
<blockquote>
Affinity groups were small nuclei of intimate friends which generally numbered a dozen or so men and women. Wherever several of these affinity groups existed, they were coordinated by a local federation and met, when possible, in monthly assemblies. The national movement, in turn, was coordinated by a Peninsular Committee, which ostensibly exercised very little directive power. Its role was meant to be strictly administrative in typical Bakuninist fashion. Affinity groups were in fact remarkably autonomous during the early thirties and often exhibited exceptional initiative. <ref>Murray Bookchin, ''To Remember Spain: The Anarchist and Syndicalist Revolution of 1936'', http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-to-remember-spain-the-anarchist-and-syndicalist-revolution-of-1936.</ref>
</blockquote>
=Economy=
The Spanish collectives initially practiced “mutualism”, a form of market socialism involving the abolition of wage-labor (working for bosses) but not the wage system.<ref>An Anarchist FAQ Version 15, “I.8.4 How were the Spanish industrial collectives co-ordinated?”. http://anarchism.pageabode.com/afaq/secI8.html.</ref> Various industries formed federations to coordinate their activities without relying on the market, and some localities formed collectivist and communist economies.
Gaston Leval writes, “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.”<ref>An Anarchist FAQ. Version 15, “I.8.4 How were the Spanish industrial collectives co-ordinated?”. http://anarchism.pageabode.com/afaq/secI8.html.</ref>
==Catalonia==
[[File:S-d-jpeg-12.jpeg|thumbnail|Collectivized textile factory in Barcelona. From Sam Dolgoff's ''The Anarchist Collectives''.]]
In Barcelona, workers collectivized the metal industry, railroads, telephone services, optical industry, textile industry, bakeries, slaughter houses, electric, gas and water utilities, transportation, health services, theaters and cinemas, beauty parlors, hotels and boarding houses.<ref>Dolgoff, ''The Anarchist Collectives'', 113-136.</ref> A spokesperson for the Valencia government's Subsecretariat of Munitions and Armament said that the war industry in Catalonia produced ten times more than the rest of the country put together.<ref> Chomsky, “Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship,” 95.</ref>
Some industries, such as woodwork, ''syndicalized'' their workplaces, meaning they put the CNT in charge of managing the industry. ''An Anarchist FAQ'' writes, “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.”<ref>An Anarchist FAQ. Version 15, “I.8.4 How were the Spanish industrial collectives co-ordinated?”. http://anarchism.pageabode.com/afaq/secI8.html.</ref>
Workers also syndicalized Catalonia's health care system. Founded in September 1936, the CNT-affiliated Health Workers' Union provided health care to all Catalonians. With 1,020 doctors and about 7,000 other workers, the syndicate ran 36 health centers. It had 9 autonomous zones, each of which nominated a delegate to attend weekly meetings of the Control Committee in Barcelona. The Catalan government and the municipalities paid for hospital expenses.<ref>Dolgoff, ''The Anarchist Collectives'', 125-128.</ref>


The work of the collectives was conducted by teams of workers, headed by a delegate chosen by each team. The land was divided into cultivated zones. Team delegates worked like the others. There were no special privileges. After the day’s work, delegates from all the work teams met on the job and made necessary technical arrangements for the next day’s work... The assembly made final decisions on all important questions and issued instructions to both the team delegates and the administrative commission.”<ref>Sam Dolgoff, The Anarchist Collectives, New York: Free Life Editions, 1974, p. 113.</ref>
Other industries, such as Bardalona's textile industry, ''confederated'' their workplaces. This meant that each workplace remained autonomous, while using the union to coordinate activities with other workplaces. The historian Ronald Fraser explains, “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 collectivised industry as a whole, the enterprise was informed and asked to change course.”<ref>An Anarchist FAQ. Version 15, “I.8.4 How were the Spanish industrial collectives co-ordinated?”. http://anarchism.pageabode.com/afaq/secI8.html.</ref>


</blockquote>
==The Levant==
The Peasant Federation of Levant coordinated the economy of 900 collectives, encompassing 1,650,000 members. The federation organized the region into 54 local federations and 5 district federations. Each district instituted a rationing of supplies and a family wage. The district federations helped equalize resources between the wealthier villages and poorer villages. <ref>Dolgoff, ''The Anarchist Collectives'', 145-148.</ref>
 
The town of Magdalena de Pulpis abolished money altogether. A resident explained, “Everyone works and everyone has the right to what he needs free of charge. He simply goes to the store where provisions and all other necessities are supplied. Everything is distributed free with only a notation of what he took.” Sam Dolgoff comments that the attempts to abolish money “were not generally successful,” due to the pressures of the war. Usually, towns implemented a family wage. <ref>Dolgoff, ''The Anarchist Collectives'', 100.</ref>
 
==Aragon==
 
The Aragon Federation of Collectives coordinated the economy of 500 collectives, encompassing 433,000 members. Collectives supplied statistics on production and consumption to their District Committees, which then sent these statistics to the Regional Committee. In February of 1937, the Federation decided to abolish the exchange of national currency within and between collectives. In place of traditional money, the Regional Committee would distribute a uniform ration booklet to each collective, leaving it to each collective to decide how to distribute rations. Small proprietors were allowed to remain outside the collective as long as they didn't infringe on the collective's rights or hire wage-workers. <ref> Dolgoff, ''The Anarchist Collectives'', 149-152</ref>  


Many areas also had District Committees that pooled the resources of all the collectives in a district, basically acting as a clearinghouse to circulate surplus from the collectives that had it to other collectives that needed it. Hundreds of collectives joined federations organized through the CNT or UGT (the socialist labor union). The federations provided economic coordination, pooling resources to allow peasants to build their own fruit and vegetable canneries, gathering information about which items were in abundance and which were in short supply, and organizing uniform exchange systems. This collective form of decision-making proved effective for the approximately seven to eight million peasants involved in this movement. Half the land in anti-fascist Spain — three-quarters of the land in Aragon — was collectivized and self-organized.
=Environment=


In August 1937, just over a year after anarchist and socialist peasants started forming collectives, the Republican government, under control of the Stalinists, had consolidated enough to move against the lawless zones of Aragon. The Karl Marx Brigade, units of the International Brigades, and other units disarmed and dissolved the collectives in Aragon, crushing any resistance and spiriting off numerous anarchists and libertarian socialists to the prisons and torture chambers the Stalinists had set up to use against their revolutionary allies. </blockquote>
After collectivizing the land, peasants in Aragon and the Levant applied innovative techniques to increase yields and improve the health of the soil. Peter Gelderloos writes that they used intercropping, putting shade-tolerant plants underneath orange trees.<ref>Peter Gelderloos, [[Anarchy Works]], “What about technology?”</ref> Daniel Guérin describes the collectives' commitment to reforestation and diversification of crops:


From An Anarchist FAQ, [[An_Anarchist_FAQ#A.5.6_Anarchism_and_the_Spanish_Revolution|"Anarchism and the Spanish Revolution"]]:
<blockquote>
<blockquote>
As Noam Chomsky notes, ''"a good example of a really large-scale anarchist revolution -- in fact the best example to my knowledge -- is the Spanish revolution in 1936, in which over most of Republican Spain there was a quite inspiring anarchist revolution that involved both industry and agriculture over substantial areas . . . And that again was, by both human measures and indeed anyone's economic measures, quite successful. That is, production continued effectively; workers in farms and factories proved quite capable of managing their affairs without coercion from above, contrary to what lots of socialists, communists, liberals and other wanted to believe."'' The revolution of 1936 was ''"based on three generations of experiment and thought and work which extended anarchist ideas to very large parts of the population."'' [Radical Priorities, p. 212]
Agricultural self-management was an indisputable success except where it was sabotaged by its opponents or interrupted by the war. After the Revolution the land was brought together into rational units, cultivated on a large scale and according to the general plan and directives of agronomists. The studies of agricultural technicians brought about yields 30 to 50 percent higher than before. The cultivated areas increased, human, animal, and mechanical energy was used in a more rational way, and working methods perfected. Crops were diversified, irrigation extended, reforestation initiated, and tree nurseries started.<ref>Guérin, ''Anarchism'', 134-4</ref>
</blockquote>
 
In Catalonia, the CNT shut down hazardous metal factories, which they announced were “centres for tuberculosis”.<ref>Iain McKay, “Objectivity and Right-Libertarian Scholarship,” 20 January 2009, http://anarchism.pageabode.com/anarcho/caplan.html.</ref>


Due to this anarchist organising and agitation, Spain in the 1930's had the largest anarchist movement in the world. At the start of the Spanish "Civil" war, over one and one half million workers and peasants were members of the CNT (the '''''National Confederation of Labour'''''), an anarcho-syndicalist union federation, and 30,000 were members of the FAI (the '''''Anarchist Federation of Iberia'''''). The total population of Spain at this time was 24 million.
=Crime=


The social revolution which met the Fascist coup on July 18th, 1936, is the greatest experiment in libertarian socialism to date. Here the last mass syndicalist union, the CNT, not only held off the fascist rising but encouraged the widespread take-over of land and factories. Over seven million people, including about two million CNT members, put self-management into practise in the most difficult of circumstances and actually improved both working conditions and output.
At its 1936 Saragossa conference, the CNT outlined its approach to crime, as Daniel Guérin summarzies:
<blockquote>
With regard to crime and punishment the Saragossa conference followed the teachings of Bakunin, stating that social injustice is the main cause of crime and, consequently, once this has been removed offenses will rarely be committed. The congress affirmed that man is not naturally evil. The shortcomings of the individual, in the moral field as well as in his role as producer, were to be investigated by popular assemblies which would make every effort to find a just solution in each separate case.<ref>Guérin, ''Anarchism'', 123.</ref>
</blockquote>


In the heady days after the 19th of July, the initiative and power truly rested in the hands of the rank-and-file members of the CNT and FAI. It was ordinary people, undoubtedly under the influence of Faistas (members of the FAI) and CNT militants, who, after defeating the fascist uprising, got production, distribution and consumption started again (under more egalitarian arrangements, of course), as well as organising and volunteering (in their tens of thousands) to join the militias, which were to be sent to free those parts of Spain that were under Franco. In every possible way the working class of Spain were creating by their own actions a new world based on their own ideas of social justice and freedom -- ideas inspired, of course, by anarchism and anarchosyndicalism.
At a public meeting described by Gaston Leval, the Aragon town of Huesca discussed how to respond to a group of individualists that left the collective but expected the collective to take care of their elderly parents. The collective decided that they would take care of the elderly no matter what. But if the individualists did not take in their parents, then the collective would not extend these individualist any land or solidarity. <ref>Leval, “Libertarian Democracy”</ref> Huesca's resolution demonstrates how an anarchist community can attach consequences to unsocial behavior.


George Orwell's eye-witness account of revolutionary Barcelona in late December, 1936, gives a vivid picture of the social transformation that had begun:
In Catalonia, the anarchists cooperated with the liberals, Communists and Socialists to form a proto-statist Central Anti-Fascist Militia Committee. It took over the work of the police. Historian Bernett Bolloten writes that the power of the committee, “rested not on the shattered machinery of state but on the revolutionary militia and police squads”.<ref>Bolloten, ''The Spanish Civil War''.</ref>


<blockquote>''"The Anarchists were still in virtual control of Catalonia and the revolution was still in full swing. To anyone who had been there since the beginning it probably seemed even in December or January that the revolutionary period was ending; but when one came straight from England the aspect of Barcelona was something startling and overwhelming. It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workman. Every shop and cafe had an inscription saying that it had been collectivised; even the bootblacks had been collectivised and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said 'Señor' or 'Don' or even 'Usted'; everyone called everyone else 'Comrade' or 'Thou', and said 'Salud!' instead of 'Buenos dias'. . . Above all, there was a belief in the revolution and the future, a feeling of having suddenly emerged into an era of equality and freedom. Human beings were trying to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine."'' ['''Homage to Catalonia''', pp. 2-3] </blockquote>
=Revolution=


The full extent of this historic revolution cannot be covered here. It will be discussed in more detail in [http://anarchism.pageabode.com/afaq/secI8.html Section I.8 of the FAQ]. All that can be done is to highlight a few points of special interest in the hope that these will give some indication of the importance of these events and encourage people to find out more about it.
At the very start of the civil war, anarchist forces defeated the fascists' July assault on Barcelona. George Orwell commented, “During the first two months of the war it was the Anarchists more than anyone else who had saved the situation, and much later than this the Anarchist militia, in spite of their indiscipline, were notoriously the best fighters among the purely Spanish forces.” <ref>Orwell, ''Homage to Catalonia'', 62.</ref> Orwell described Catalonia's militias:


All industry in Catalonia was placed either under workers' self-management '''or''' workers' control (that is, either totally taking over '''all''' aspects of management, in the first case, or, in the second, controlling the old management). In some cases, whole town and regional economies were transformed into federations of collectives. The example of the Railway Federation (which was set up to manage the railway lines in Catalonia, Aragon and Valencia) can be given as a typical example. The base of the federation was the local assemblies:
<blockquote> Everyone from general to private drew the same pay, ate the same food, wore the same clothes, and mingled on terms of complete equality. If you wanted to slap the general commanding the division on the back and ask him for a cigarette, you could do so, and no one thought it curious. In theory at any rate each militia was a democracy and not a hierarchy. It was understood that orders had to be obeyed, but it was also understood that when you gave an order you gave it as comrade to comrade and not as superior to inferior. There were officers and N.C.O.s, but there was no military rank in the ordinary sense; no titles, no badges, no heel-clicking and saluting. They had attempted to produce within the militias a sort of temporary working model of the classless society. Of course there was not perfect equality, but there was a nearer approach to it than I had ever seen or than I would have thought conceivable in time of war. <ref>Orwell, ''Homage to Catalonia'', 27.</ref> </blockquote>


<blockquote>
The social revolution failed due to several factors. First, the Communists violently repressed the social revolution, starting with bureaucratic restrictions and culminating in brutal attacks on the Barcelona anarchists in May 1937, killing 500 people. By repressing the anarchists, Stalin sought to maintain an alliance with liberal capitalist states like France and the United Kingdom. As Orwell wrote, “In Spain the Communist 'line' was undoubtedly influenced by the fact that France, Russia's ally, would strongly object to a revolutionary neighbour and would raise heaven and earth to prevent the liberation of Spanish Morocco.”<ref>An Anarchist FAQ Version 15, “Section I.8 Does Revolutionary Spain show that libertarian socialism can work in practice?”, http://anarchism.pageabode.com/afaq/secI8.html#seci89. Chomsky, “Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship”  88-89, 102. Orwell, ''Homage to Catalonia'', 57.</ref>
''"All the workers of each locality would meet twice a week to examine all that pertained to the work to be done... The local general assembly named a committee to manage the general activity in each station and its annexes. At [these] meetings, the decisions (direccion) of this committee, whose members continued to work [at their previous jobs], would be subjected to the approval or disapproval of the workers, after giving reports and answering questions."'' </blockquote>


The delegates on the committee could be removed by an assembly at any time and the highest co-ordinating body of the Railway Federation was the "'''''Revolutionary Committee'''''," whose members were elected by union assemblies in the various divisions. The control over the rail lines, according to Gaston Leval, ''"did not operate from above downwards, as in a statist and centralised system. The Revolutionary Committee had no such powers. . . The members of the. . . committee being content to supervise the general activity and to co-ordinate that of the different routes that made up the network."'' [Gaston Leval, '''Collectives in the Spanish Revolution''', p. 255]
Second, the CNT and FAI joined the Catalan government in September 1937 to joined the central government in November. Most anarchists now consider this decision to have been unstrategic, since collaborating with the hierarchical state apparatus inhibited the mass participation of workers and peasants that could have enabled a military victory. <ref>An Anarchist Faq Version 15, “Section I.8.11 “Was the decision to collaborate a product of anarchist theory?” http://anarchism.pageabode.com/afaq/secI8.html#seci811.</ref>


On the land, tens of thousands of peasants and rural day workers created voluntary, self-managed collectives. The quality of life improved as co-operation allowed the introduction of health care, education, machinery and investment in the social infrastructure. As well as increasing production, the collectives increased freedom. As one member puts it, ''"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. 360]
''An Anarchist FAQ'' contends that the anarchists may have won the war if they had refused to join the Republican government and instead called a plenary among anti-fascist forces to discuss alternatives to a Spanish state: “It is likely, given the wave of collectivization and what happened in Aragon, that the decision would have been different and the first step would have made to turn this plenum into the basis of a free federation of workers associations—i.e. the framework of a self-managed society—which could have  smashed the state and ensured no other appeared to take its place.”<ref>An Anarchist FAQ, “Section I.8”</ref> David Cattell, while sympathetic to the hierarchal control the Communists imposed on the anarchist territories, admits that it “tended to break the fighting spirit of the people.” Noam Chomsky points out that Austurias, the one region where central control had not destroyed the workers' collectives, was the only area where workers continued fighting well after Franco's victory.<ref>Chomsky, “Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship.”</ref>


We discuss the revolution in more detail in section I.8. For example, sections I.8.3 and I.8.4 discuss in more depth how the industrial collectives. The rural collectives are discussed in sections I.8.5 and I.8.6. We must stress that these sections are summaries of a vast social movement, and more information can be gathered from such works as Gaston Leval's '''Collectives in the Spanish Revolution''', Sam Dolfgoff's '''The Anarchist Collectives''', Jose Peirats' '''The CNT in the Spanish Revolution''' and a host of other anarchist accounts of the revolution.
Chomsky argues that the anarchists may have succeeded in their social revolution if they allied with with the Moroccon independence movement and therefore demoralized Franco's Morrocon troops.<ref>Chomsky, “Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship”</ref> The fascist side won the civil war in March of 1939.</ref>


On the social front, anarchist organisations created rational schools, a libertarian health service, social centres, and so on. The '''''Mujeres Libres''''' (free women) combated the traditional role of women in Spanish society, empowering thousands both inside and outside the anarchist movement (see '''The Free Women of Spain''' by Martha A. Ackelsberg for more information on this very important organisation). This activity on the social front only built on the work started long before the outbreak of the war; for example, the unions often funded rational schools, workers centres, and so on.
=Neighboring Societies=


The voluntary militias that went to free the rest of Spain from Franco were organised on anarchist principles and included both men and women. There was no rank, no saluting and no officer class. Everybody was equal. George Orwell, a member of the POUM militia (the POUM was a dissident Marxist party, influenced by Leninism but not, as the Communists asserted, Trotskyist) makes this clear:
Anarchists felt considerable pressure from the Western imperial powers, and this pressure influenced their decision to collaborate with the Catalonian and national governments. At a 23 July 1936 CNT plenary, anarchists decided not to abolish the Catalonian government, even though the region's president offered them the opportunity. Diegeo Abad de Santillan voiced one reason for allowing the government to remain; its abolition could invite British intervention.<ref>Wetzel. ''Workers Power and the Spanish Revolution''.</ref> When anarchists entered the government in November 1936, they naively predicted Western countries would come to aid the Spanish against Franco.


<blockquote>    ''"The essential point of the [militia] system was the social equality between officers and men. Everyone from general to private drew the same pay, ate the same food, wore the same clothes, and mingled on terms of complete equality. If you wanted to slap the general commanding the division on the back and ask him for a cigarette, you could do so, and no one thought it curious. In theory at any rate each militia was a democracy and not a hierarchy. It was understood that orders had to be obeyed, but it was also understood that when you gave an order you gave it as comrade to comrade and not as superior to inferior. There were officers and N.C.O.s, but there was no military rank in the ordinary sense; no titles, no badges, no heel-clicking and saluting. They had attempted to produce within the militias a sort of temporary working model of the classless society. Of course there was not perfect equality, but there was a nearer approach to it than I had ever seen or that I would have though conceivable in time of war. . . "'' ['''Op. Cit.''', p. 26] </blockquote>
Chomsky documents how the Western powers discreetly supported Franco. For example, the British navy blockaded the Straits of Gibraltar on 11 August 1936, in response to Republican ships damaging a British consulate in Algerciras. The ''New York Times'' reported, “this action helps the Rebels by preventing attacks on Algeciras, where troops from Morocco land.” Republican ships had been trying to capture the city to isolate the fascists from Morocco. The US also aided Franco, informally; Washington urged Martin Aircraft Company in August of 1936 not to honor a pre-insurrection agreement to supply Spain with aircraft, and Washington urged Mexico not to send US war materials to Spain.<ref>Chomsky, ''Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship''.</ref>


In Spain, however, as elsewhere, the anarchist movement was smashed between Stalinism (the Communist Party) on the one hand and Capitalism (Franco) on the other. Unfortunately, the anarchists placed anti-fascist unity before the revolution, thus helping their enemies to defeat both them and the revolution. Whether they were forced by circumstances into this position or could have avoided it is still being debated (see section I.8.10 for a discussion of why the CNT-FAI collaborated and section I.8.11 on why this decision was '''not''' a product of anarchist theory).
==Anarchist terror==


Orwell's account of his experiences in the militia's indicates why the Spanish Revolution is so important to anarchists:
Anarchists committed a significant degree of terror against actual and alleged sympathizers of fascism. As Bolloten writes, “Thousands of members of the clergy and religious orders as well as of the propertied classes were killed, but others, fearing arrest or execution, fled abroad, including many prominent liberal and moderate Republicans.”<ref>Bolloten, ''The Spanish Civil War''.</ref> The anarchist Diego Abad Santillan estimates that the Catalonian anarchists murdered between 4,000 and 5,000 rightists and members of the (overwhelmingly right-wing) Catholic clergy.<ref>Iain McKay, “Objectivity and Right-Libertarian Scholarship,” 20 January 2009, http://anarchism.pageabode.com/anarcho/caplan.html.</ref>


<blockquote>''"I had dropped more or less by chance into the only community of any size in Western Europe where political consciousness and disbelief in capitalism were more normal than their opposites. Up here in Aragon one was among tens of thousands of people, mainly though not entirely of working-class origin, all living at the same level and mingling on terms of equality. In theory it was perfect equality, and even in practice it was not far from it. There is a sense in which it would be true to say that one was experiencing a foretaste of Socialism, by which I mean that the prevailing mental atmosphere was that of Socialism. Many of the normal motives of civilised life -- snobbishness, money-grubbing, fear of the boss, etc. -- had simply ceased to exist. The ordinary class- division of society had disappeared to an extent that is almost unthinkable in the money-tainted air of England; there was no one there except the peasants and ourselves, and no one owned anyone else as his master. . . One had been in a community where hope was more normal than apathy or cynicism, where the word 'comrade' stood for comradeship and not, as in most countries, for humbug. One had breathed the air of equality. I am well aware that it is now the fashion to deny that Socialism has anything to do with equality. In every country in the world a huge tribe of party-hacks and sleek little professors are busy 'proving' that Socialism means no more than a planned state-capitalism with the grab-motive left intact. But fortunately there also exists a vision of Socialism quite different from this. The thing that attracts ordinary men to Socialism and makes them willing to risk their skins for it, the 'mystique' of Socialism, is the idea of equality; to the vast majority of people Socialism means a classless society, or it means nothing at all . . . In that community where no one was on the make, where there was a shortage of everything but no boot-licking, one got, perhaps, a crude forecast of what the opening stages of Socialism might be like. And, after all, instead of disillusioning me it deeply attracted me. . ."'' ['''Op. Cit.''', pp. 83-84] </blockquote>
Drawing on these facts, the “anarcho”-capitalist Bryan Caplan argues the “Anarchist militants' wave of murders” followed logically from their ideology of class struggle.<ref>Bryan Caplan, “The Anarcho-Statists of Spain: An Historical, Economic and Philosophical Analysis of Spanish Anarchism,” http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/spain.htm.</ref> Iain McKay responded that while these assassinations are inexcusable, they were carried out by a small minority of anarchists and faced fierce condemnations from the CNT-FAI. In fact, the CNT-FAI had a policy of executing anyone caught terrorizing innocent people, including its own members. The FAI executed some anarchist militants under this policy. Moreover, McKay notes that the anarchists' murders pale in comparison to those committed by Franco's forces, who received strong support from capitalists inside and outside of Spain. In Aragon's town of Zaragoza, fascists murdered 3,000 anti-fascists, mostly CNT members. McKay comments:


For more information on the Spanish Revolution, the following books are recommended: '''Lessons of the Spanish Revolution''' by Vernon Richards; '''Anarchists in the Spanish Revolution''' and '''The CNT in the Spanish Revolution''' by Jose Peirats; '''Free Women of Spain''' by Martha A. Ackelsberg; '''The Anarchist Collectives''' edited by Sam Dolgoff; ''"Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship"'' by Noam Chomsky (in '''The Chomsky Reader'''); '''The Anarchists of Casas Viejas''' by Jerome R. Mintz; and '''Homage to Catalonia''' by George Orwell.
<blockquote>
“In other words, the forces supported by capitalists murdered almost as many people in one town as the armed population did in the whole of Catalonia. After Franco won the civil war, he murdered tens of thousands more (probably hundreds of thousands) and produced a nation into which capitalists happily invested. As capitalists have discovered across the world, terror is an effective means of ensuring high profits and employer power.” <ref>McKay, “Objectivity and Right-Libertarian Scholarship”.</ref>
</blockquote>
</blockquote>


<references/>
<references/>
--[[User:DFischer|DFischer]] ([[User talk:DFischer|talk]]) 14:21, 19 October 2014 (EDT)

Revision as of 11:21, 19 October 2014

Poster from the 1930s. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism_in_Spain#mediaviewer/File:CNT_-_La_Barrera_Inexpugnable.jpg

During the 1936-9 Spanish Civil War, anarchists coordinated thousands of horizontally-run communities, factories and farms, especially in the regions of Catalonia, Aragon, and the Levant. Frank Mintz estimates that the anarchist collectives encompassed 610,000 to 800,000 workers, or 3,200,000 people including their families. Gaston Leval, a French anarchist who fought in the war, describes a "revolutionary experience involving, directly or indirectly, 7 to 8 million people."[1].

The 1.5 million-member anarcho-syndicalist National Confederation of Labor (CNT) and the 300,000-member Anarchist Federation of Iberia (FAI) coordinated the anarchist collectives and organized militias to defend them. Because of their close collaboration, writers often abbreviate the two organizations together as CNT-FAI.

The Spanish Civil War pitted Fransisco Franco's fascists against an alliance of anarchists, Communists, Socialists and Republicans. Within the anti-fascist side, anarchists faced severe repression from the Communists and Republicans; in May of 1937, the Communists attacked anarchists in Barcelona, sounding "the death-knell of the revolution” according to Broué and Témime.[2] However, collectives retained various degrees of power throughout the civil war, and Sam Dolgoff refers to “the Spanish Revolution of 1936-1939.”[3]

Anarchist Spain. From Sam Dolgoff's The Anarchist Collectives


Culture

The journalist George Orwell, who fought in the civil war with the Marxist POUM militia, describes anarchist-held Catalonia in 1936 as a site of a far-reaching cultural transformation:

It was the first time I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workmen. Every shop and café had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized; even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said 'Señor' or 'Don' or even 'Usted'; everyone called everyone else 'Comrade' and 'Thou,' and said 'Salud!' instead of 'Buenos dias.' Tipping had been forbidden by law since the time of Primo de Rivera; almost my first experience was receiving a lecture from an hotel manager for trying to tip a lift-boy. There were no private motor cars, they had all been commandered, and all the trams and taxis and much of the other transport were painted red and black. The revolutionary posters were everywhere, flaming from the walls in clean reds and blues that made the few remaining advertisements look like daubs of mud. Down the Ramblas, the wide central artery of the town where crowds of people streamed constantly to and fro, the loud-speakers were bellowing revolutionary songs all day and far into the night. And it was the aspect of the crowds that was the queerest thing of all. In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist. Except for a small number of women and foreigners there were no 'well-dressed' people at all. Practically everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue overalls or some variant of the militia uniform. All this was queer and moving. There was much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.”[4]

In May 1936, anarchist women formed the group Mujeres Libres, meaning “Free Women,” advocating an end to sexism and all other forms of domination. They struggled for rights to contraception, abortion and divorce. Membership rose to 30,000 over the two years of the group's existence. They established a women's college in Barcelona, maternity hospitals, and schools for children. Women initially fought in the anarchist militias, but the Republican government ordered women to leave the frontlines in November of 1936.[5] Peter Marshall describes some limitations of women's liberation in revolutionary Spain:

The liberation of women, however, was only partial: they were often paid a lower rate than men in the collective; they continued to perform 'women's work'; they saw the struggle primarily in terms of class and not sex. But in a traditionally Catholic and patriarchal society, there were undoubtedly new possibilities for women and they appeared unaccompanied in public for the first time with a new self-assurance. [6]

In its 1936 Saragossa program, the anarcho-syndicalist CNT agreed to support and send supplies to people with a broad variety of lifestyles, including those who wished to live as naturalists, nudists and non-industrialists. Daniel Guérin comments, “Does this make us smile? On the eve of a vast, blood, social transformation, the CNT did not think it foolish to try to meet the infinitely varied aspirations of individual human beings.”[7]

Decisions

Aragon

In rural Aragon, collectivized towns implemented what Gaston Leval calls “libertarian democracy,” based on majority vote. Local decision-making assemblies met weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly depending on the town. Leval remarked that these assemblies “would not last more than a few hours. They dealt with concrete, precise subjects concretely and precisely. And all who had something to say could express themselves.”

Leval describes an assembly he attended in Huesca, Aragon. About 500 people attended, including 100 women. One agenda item involved residents who had left the collective. These “individualists” needed bread and wanted to take one of the collective's bakeries for themselves. After discussing several possible responses, the town assembly decided to keep the bakery but to bake extra bread for the individualists, on the condition that they supplied their own flour. [8]

Catalonia

The Republican government of industrial Catalonia effectively collapsed in July 1936, when the anarchists successfully defended the region from Franco's attack. After the battle, the CNT-FAI “seized post offices and telephone exchanges, formed police squads and militia units in Barcelona and in other towns and villages of Catalonia, and through their dominion over most of the economic life in the region.” The liberal historian Burnett Bolloten writes that the “practical significance” of the Catalan government “all but disappeared in the whirlwind of the Revolution.”[9] Chomsky concurs, “In Catalonia, the bourgeois government headed by Luis Companys retained nominal authority, but real power was in the hands of the anarchist-dominated communities.”[10]

Catalonia's president Luis Companys convinced the anarchists to establish the independent but proto-statist Central Anti-Fascist Militia Committee, which included representatives from the anarchist groups and other anti-fascists. According to the Bolloten, the Committee “immediately became the de facto executive body in the region. Its power rested not on the shattered machinery of state but on the revolutionary milita and police squads and upon the multitudinous committees that sprang up in the region during the first days of the Revolution.”[11] Tom Wetzel argues that the Central Anti-Fascist Militia Committee “was not an organ of working class 'dual power.' The Popular Front leaders in fact controlled the committee, just like the government.” Of the committee's 15 seats, the CNT and FAI together only held five. Although the CNT had three times the Socialist UGT's membership, both organizations had 3 seats.[12]

FAI

The Anarchist Federation of Iberia (FAI) “formed a near-model of libertarian organization,” according to Murray Bookchin. Its basic political unit was the affinity group:

Affinity groups were small nuclei of intimate friends which generally numbered a dozen or so men and women. Wherever several of these affinity groups existed, they were coordinated by a local federation and met, when possible, in monthly assemblies. The national movement, in turn, was coordinated by a Peninsular Committee, which ostensibly exercised very little directive power. Its role was meant to be strictly administrative in typical Bakuninist fashion. Affinity groups were in fact remarkably autonomous during the early thirties and often exhibited exceptional initiative. [13]

Economy

The Spanish collectives initially practiced “mutualism”, a form of market socialism involving the abolition of wage-labor (working for bosses) but not the wage system.[14] Various industries formed federations to coordinate their activities without relying on the market, and some localities formed collectivist and communist economies.

Gaston Leval writes, “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.”[15]


Catalonia

Collectivized textile factory in Barcelona. From Sam Dolgoff's The Anarchist Collectives.

In Barcelona, workers collectivized the metal industry, railroads, telephone services, optical industry, textile industry, bakeries, slaughter houses, electric, gas and water utilities, transportation, health services, theaters and cinemas, beauty parlors, hotels and boarding houses.[16] A spokesperson for the Valencia government's Subsecretariat of Munitions and Armament said that the war industry in Catalonia produced ten times more than the rest of the country put together.[17]

Some industries, such as woodwork, syndicalized their workplaces, meaning they put the CNT in charge of managing the industry. An Anarchist FAQ writes, “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.”[18]

Workers also syndicalized Catalonia's health care system. Founded in September 1936, the CNT-affiliated Health Workers' Union provided health care to all Catalonians. With 1,020 doctors and about 7,000 other workers, the syndicate ran 36 health centers. It had 9 autonomous zones, each of which nominated a delegate to attend weekly meetings of the Control Committee in Barcelona. The Catalan government and the municipalities paid for hospital expenses.[19]

Other industries, such as Bardalona's textile industry, confederated their workplaces. This meant that each workplace remained autonomous, while using the union to coordinate activities with other workplaces. The historian Ronald Fraser explains, “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 collectivised industry as a whole, the enterprise was informed and asked to change course.”[20]

The Levant

The Peasant Federation of Levant coordinated the economy of 900 collectives, encompassing 1,650,000 members. The federation organized the region into 54 local federations and 5 district federations. Each district instituted a rationing of supplies and a family wage. The district federations helped equalize resources between the wealthier villages and poorer villages. [21]

The town of Magdalena de Pulpis abolished money altogether. A resident explained, “Everyone works and everyone has the right to what he needs free of charge. He simply goes to the store where provisions and all other necessities are supplied. Everything is distributed free with only a notation of what he took.” Sam Dolgoff comments that the attempts to abolish money “were not generally successful,” due to the pressures of the war. Usually, towns implemented a family wage. [22]

Aragon

The Aragon Federation of Collectives coordinated the economy of 500 collectives, encompassing 433,000 members. Collectives supplied statistics on production and consumption to their District Committees, which then sent these statistics to the Regional Committee. In February of 1937, the Federation decided to abolish the exchange of national currency within and between collectives. In place of traditional money, the Regional Committee would distribute a uniform ration booklet to each collective, leaving it to each collective to decide how to distribute rations. Small proprietors were allowed to remain outside the collective as long as they didn't infringe on the collective's rights or hire wage-workers. [23]

Environment

After collectivizing the land, peasants in Aragon and the Levant applied innovative techniques to increase yields and improve the health of the soil. Peter Gelderloos writes that they used intercropping, putting shade-tolerant plants underneath orange trees.[24] Daniel Guérin describes the collectives' commitment to reforestation and diversification of crops:

Agricultural self-management was an indisputable success except where it was sabotaged by its opponents or interrupted by the war. After the Revolution the land was brought together into rational units, cultivated on a large scale and according to the general plan and directives of agronomists. The studies of agricultural technicians brought about yields 30 to 50 percent higher than before. The cultivated areas increased, human, animal, and mechanical energy was used in a more rational way, and working methods perfected. Crops were diversified, irrigation extended, reforestation initiated, and tree nurseries started.[25]

In Catalonia, the CNT shut down hazardous metal factories, which they announced were “centres for tuberculosis”.[26]

Crime

At its 1936 Saragossa conference, the CNT outlined its approach to crime, as Daniel Guérin summarzies:

With regard to crime and punishment the Saragossa conference followed the teachings of Bakunin, stating that social injustice is the main cause of crime and, consequently, once this has been removed offenses will rarely be committed. The congress affirmed that man is not naturally evil. The shortcomings of the individual, in the moral field as well as in his role as producer, were to be investigated by popular assemblies which would make every effort to find a just solution in each separate case.[27]

At a public meeting described by Gaston Leval, the Aragon town of Huesca discussed how to respond to a group of individualists that left the collective but expected the collective to take care of their elderly parents. The collective decided that they would take care of the elderly no matter what. But if the individualists did not take in their parents, then the collective would not extend these individualist any land or solidarity. [28] Huesca's resolution demonstrates how an anarchist community can attach consequences to unsocial behavior.

In Catalonia, the anarchists cooperated with the liberals, Communists and Socialists to form a proto-statist Central Anti-Fascist Militia Committee. It took over the work of the police. Historian Bernett Bolloten writes that the power of the committee, “rested not on the shattered machinery of state but on the revolutionary militia and police squads”.[29]

Revolution

At the very start of the civil war, anarchist forces defeated the fascists' July assault on Barcelona. George Orwell commented, “During the first two months of the war it was the Anarchists more than anyone else who had saved the situation, and much later than this the Anarchist militia, in spite of their indiscipline, were notoriously the best fighters among the purely Spanish forces.” [30] Orwell described Catalonia's militias:

Everyone from general to private drew the same pay, ate the same food, wore the same clothes, and mingled on terms of complete equality. If you wanted to slap the general commanding the division on the back and ask him for a cigarette, you could do so, and no one thought it curious. In theory at any rate each militia was a democracy and not a hierarchy. It was understood that orders had to be obeyed, but it was also understood that when you gave an order you gave it as comrade to comrade and not as superior to inferior. There were officers and N.C.O.s, but there was no military rank in the ordinary sense; no titles, no badges, no heel-clicking and saluting. They had attempted to produce within the militias a sort of temporary working model of the classless society. Of course there was not perfect equality, but there was a nearer approach to it than I had ever seen or than I would have thought conceivable in time of war. [31]

The social revolution failed due to several factors. First, the Communists violently repressed the social revolution, starting with bureaucratic restrictions and culminating in brutal attacks on the Barcelona anarchists in May 1937, killing 500 people. By repressing the anarchists, Stalin sought to maintain an alliance with liberal capitalist states like France and the United Kingdom. As Orwell wrote, “In Spain the Communist 'line' was undoubtedly influenced by the fact that France, Russia's ally, would strongly object to a revolutionary neighbour and would raise heaven and earth to prevent the liberation of Spanish Morocco.”[32]

Second, the CNT and FAI joined the Catalan government in September 1937 to joined the central government in November. Most anarchists now consider this decision to have been unstrategic, since collaborating with the hierarchical state apparatus inhibited the mass participation of workers and peasants that could have enabled a military victory. [33]

An Anarchist FAQ contends that the anarchists may have won the war if they had refused to join the Republican government and instead called a plenary among anti-fascist forces to discuss alternatives to a Spanish state: “It is likely, given the wave of collectivization and what happened in Aragon, that the decision would have been different and the first step would have made to turn this plenum into the basis of a free federation of workers associations—i.e. the framework of a self-managed society—which could have smashed the state and ensured no other appeared to take its place.”[34] David Cattell, while sympathetic to the hierarchal control the Communists imposed on the anarchist territories, admits that it “tended to break the fighting spirit of the people.” Noam Chomsky points out that Austurias, the one region where central control had not destroyed the workers' collectives, was the only area where workers continued fighting well after Franco's victory.[35]

Chomsky argues that the anarchists may have succeeded in their social revolution if they allied with with the Moroccon independence movement and therefore demoralized Franco's Morrocon troops.[36] The fascist side won the civil war in March of 1939.</ref>

Neighboring Societies

Anarchists felt considerable pressure from the Western imperial powers, and this pressure influenced their decision to collaborate with the Catalonian and national governments. At a 23 July 1936 CNT plenary, anarchists decided not to abolish the Catalonian government, even though the region's president offered them the opportunity. Diegeo Abad de Santillan voiced one reason for allowing the government to remain; its abolition could invite British intervention.[37] When anarchists entered the government in November 1936, they naively predicted Western countries would come to aid the Spanish against Franco.

Chomsky documents how the Western powers discreetly supported Franco. For example, the British navy blockaded the Straits of Gibraltar on 11 August 1936, in response to Republican ships damaging a British consulate in Algerciras. The New York Times reported, “this action helps the Rebels by preventing attacks on Algeciras, where troops from Morocco land.” Republican ships had been trying to capture the city to isolate the fascists from Morocco. The US also aided Franco, informally; Washington urged Martin Aircraft Company in August of 1936 not to honor a pre-insurrection agreement to supply Spain with aircraft, and Washington urged Mexico not to send US war materials to Spain.[38]

Anarchist terror

Anarchists committed a significant degree of terror against actual and alleged sympathizers of fascism. As Bolloten writes, “Thousands of members of the clergy and religious orders as well as of the propertied classes were killed, but others, fearing arrest or execution, fled abroad, including many prominent liberal and moderate Republicans.”[39] The anarchist Diego Abad Santillan estimates that the Catalonian anarchists murdered between 4,000 and 5,000 rightists and members of the (overwhelmingly right-wing) Catholic clergy.[40]

Drawing on these facts, the “anarcho”-capitalist Bryan Caplan argues the “Anarchist militants' wave of murders” followed logically from their ideology of class struggle.[41] Iain McKay responded that while these assassinations are inexcusable, they were carried out by a small minority of anarchists and faced fierce condemnations from the CNT-FAI. In fact, the CNT-FAI had a policy of executing anyone caught terrorizing innocent people, including its own members. The FAI executed some anarchist militants under this policy. Moreover, McKay notes that the anarchists' murders pale in comparison to those committed by Franco's forces, who received strong support from capitalists inside and outside of Spain. In Aragon's town of Zaragoza, fascists murdered 3,000 anti-fascists, mostly CNT members. McKay comments:

“In other words, the forces supported by capitalists murdered almost as many people in one town as the armed population did in the whole of Catalonia. After Franco won the civil war, he murdered tens of thousands more (probably hundreds of thousands) and produced a nation into which capitalists happily invested. As capitalists have discovered across the world, terror is an effective means of ensuring high profits and employer power.” [42]

  1. ↑ Sam Dolgoff, The Anarchist Collectives: Workers’ Self-Management in the Spanish Revolution, 1936–1939, Anarchist Library, http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/sam-dolgoff-editor-the-anarchist-collectives. 104, 40
  2. ↑ Noam Chomsky, “Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship” in The Chomsky Reader (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987), 102.
  3. ↑ Dolgoff, The Anarchist Collectives, 39.
  4. ↑ George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (USA: Harcourt, Inc., 1980), 4-5.
  5. ↑ Connor McLaughlin, “Free Women of Spain,” http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/ws/spain48.html.
  6. ↑ Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (London: Harper Perennial, 2008).
  7. ↑ Daniel Guérin, Anarchism: From Theory to Practice (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970).
  8. ↑ Gaston Leval, “Libertarian Democracy” in Collectives in the Spanish Revolution, Libcom.org, http://libcom.org/library/collectives-spanish-revolution-gaston-leval
  9. ↑ Burnett Bolloten, The Spanish Civil War: Revolution and Counterrevolution (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). https://libcom.org/library/spanish-civil-war-revolution-counterrevolution-burnett-bolloten.
  10. ↑ Chomsky, “Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship”
  11. ↑ Bolloten, The Spanish Civil War”.
  12. ↑ Tom Wetzel, “Workers Power and the Spanish Revolution”. https://libcom.org/library/workers-power-and-the-spanish-revolution-tom-wetzel.
  13. ↑ Murray Bookchin, To Remember Spain: The Anarchist and Syndicalist Revolution of 1936, http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-to-remember-spain-the-anarchist-and-syndicalist-revolution-of-1936.
  14. ↑ An Anarchist FAQ Version 15, “I.8.4 How were the Spanish industrial collectives co-ordinated?”. http://anarchism.pageabode.com/afaq/secI8.html.
  15. ↑ An Anarchist FAQ. Version 15, “I.8.4 How were the Spanish industrial collectives co-ordinated?”. http://anarchism.pageabode.com/afaq/secI8.html.
  16. ↑ Dolgoff, The Anarchist Collectives, 113-136.
  17. ↑ Chomsky, “Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship,” 95.
  18. ↑ An Anarchist FAQ. Version 15, “I.8.4 How were the Spanish industrial collectives co-ordinated?”. http://anarchism.pageabode.com/afaq/secI8.html.
  19. ↑ Dolgoff, The Anarchist Collectives, 125-128.
  20. ↑ An Anarchist FAQ. Version 15, “I.8.4 How were the Spanish industrial collectives co-ordinated?”. http://anarchism.pageabode.com/afaq/secI8.html.
  21. ↑ Dolgoff, The Anarchist Collectives, 145-148.
  22. ↑ Dolgoff, The Anarchist Collectives, 100.
  23. ↑ Dolgoff, The Anarchist Collectives, 149-152
  24. ↑ Peter Gelderloos, Anarchy Works, “What about technology?”
  25. ↑ Guérin, Anarchism, 134-4
  26. ↑ Iain McKay, “Objectivity and Right-Libertarian Scholarship,” 20 January 2009, http://anarchism.pageabode.com/anarcho/caplan.html.
  27. ↑ Guérin, Anarchism, 123.
  28. ↑ Leval, “Libertarian Democracy”
  29. ↑ Bolloten, The Spanish Civil War.
  30. ↑ Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, 62.
  31. ↑ Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, 27.
  32. ↑ An Anarchist FAQ Version 15, “Section I.8 Does Revolutionary Spain show that libertarian socialism can work in practice?”, http://anarchism.pageabode.com/afaq/secI8.html#seci89. Chomsky, “Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship” 88-89, 102. Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, 57.
  33. ↑ An Anarchist Faq Version 15, “Section I.8.11 “Was the decision to collaborate a product of anarchist theory?” http://anarchism.pageabode.com/afaq/secI8.html#seci811.
  34. ↑ An Anarchist FAQ, “Section I.8”
  35. ↑ Chomsky, “Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship.”
  36. ↑ Chomsky, “Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship”
  37. ↑ Wetzel. Workers Power and the Spanish Revolution.
  38. ↑ Chomsky, Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship.
  39. ↑ Bolloten, The Spanish Civil War.
  40. ↑ Iain McKay, “Objectivity and Right-Libertarian Scholarship,” 20 January 2009, http://anarchism.pageabode.com/anarcho/caplan.html.
  41. ↑ Bryan Caplan, “The Anarcho-Statists of Spain: An Historical, Economic and Philosophical Analysis of Spanish Anarchism,” http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/spain.htm.
  42. ↑ McKay, “Objectivity and Right-Libertarian Scholarship”.

--DFischer (talk) 14:21, 19 October 2014 (EDT)

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