Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (92 page)

These remarkable resolutions of a congress which sought to define the ‘Confederal Conception of Libertarian Communism’ were not presented as a specific programme or a blueprint for a future society. They were offered as the broad outlines of an initial plan, as ‘the point of departure for Humanity towards its integral liberation’.
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But while these were all revolutionary demands, and revolution was in the air, the Congress made no concrete arrangements to prepare for one. A proposal that militias should be trained was defeated by one favouring the idea of guerrilla warfare. The revolutionary general strike was to be the answer to military rebellions. The vagueness about the means for realizing
comunismo libertario
did not however diminish its popularity. At the time of the Congress, the CNT had half a million members; by the end of the year, it had swelled to more than one and a half million.

When Franco rebelled against the republic on 19 July 1936, his forces were rapidly disarmed by popular militias. By the end of July, he was left in control of only half the country. The CNT responded by declaring the revolutionary general strike and by calling for the collectivization of the land and factories. For the following ten months the CNT and the FAI were amongst the dominant associations in republican Spain. The anarchosyndicalists
immediately took over the running of Barcelona. As George Orwell observed, most of the active revolutionaries were ‘Anarchists with a mistrust of all parliaments’.
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Catalunya became virtually an independent republic. A Committee of Anti-Fascist Militias was set up to represent the workers’ organizations and various political parties and groupings. But when confronted with the issue of dissolving the Generalitat, the provisional government of Catalunya, the leaders of the CNT-FAI made the crucial decision to leave it intact and support its President Lluis Companys. García Oliver lamely commented: ‘The CNT and the FAI decided on collaboration and democracy, renouncing revolutionary totalitarianism which would lead to the strangulation of the revolution by the anarchist and Confederal dictatorship.’
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Oliver spelt out the dilemma more clearly as a choice ‘between Libertarian Communism, which meant anarchist dictatorship, and democracy which meant collaboration’.
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The decision to collaborate with the Catalan government however put a break on the further development of the social revolution. Within two months the Committee of the Anti-Fascist Militias was abolished. On 27 September 1936 the anarchist leaders of the CNT-FAI entered the government of the Generalitat, vainly trying to justify their action by referring to it as a Regional Defence Council. They had started down the slippery slide to parliamentary participation. Forgetting their function as delegates, they tried to direct the popular movement. They became mesmerized by the slogan: ‘
Sacrificamos a todo menos a la victoria!’
(We sacrifice all except victory!) In the long run, the social revolution itself was to be sacrificed for the war against Franco.

But while the CNT leadership rejected an ‘anarchist dictatorship’ and opted for collaboration with other republican political parties and unions, it still supported the collectivization process. With the co-operation of a large part of the socialist UGT, members of the CNT rapidly collectivized the land and took over factories in the areas under the control of the republican forces. Although short-lived, the successful outcome of the experiment demonstrated triumphantly that workers and peasants can manage their own affairs and that
comunismo libertario
is firmly in the realm of the possible.

The anarchists, like the other factions, formed themselves into militia groups, electing their own officers, and discussing orders before carrying them out. The militia columns may have been somewhat chaotic at first but as the professional soldier Colonel Jimenez de la Beraza observed: ‘From a military point of view it is chaos, but it is chaos which works. Don’t disturb it!’
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The lack of military discipline was more than compensated by the initiative and courage of the columns. Orwell asserted that the anarchist
militias were ‘notoriously the best fighters amongst the purely Spanish forces’.
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As he went with papers from the Independent Labour Party, Orwell was drafted into the dissident Communist group POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista), and he preferred it to the International Brigades. But he confessed that if he had understood the situation better he would have probably joined the anarchists.
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Orwell moreover went out of his way to correct the misrepresentations of the anarchists and syndicalists in England and to stress the remarkable achievements of Spanish anarchism at the beginning of the war, especially in Catahinya.
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Another Englishman, Walter Gregory, was deeply impressed by the anarchists, despite his communist affiliation: ‘Their obvious sincerity, dedication and enthusiasm were wonderful to see. No amount of hardship seemed to lessen their deeply held conviction in the natural justice of their cause or the inevitably of its fulfilment.’
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Yet despite the enthusiasm and bravery of the anarchist militias, after the initial drive of Durruti’s column into Aragón, the principal anarchist front became one of the most static of the whole war.

In the country behind the war fronts, the peasants drawing on their own communal traditions collectivized their land in Andalucía, Catalunya, the Levante, Aragón and parts of Castilla immediately after Franco’s rebellion in July 1936. By 1937 some three million people were living in rural collectives. In Aragón about three-quarters of the land was managed through the collectives which ranged from a hundred to several thousand members. In Andalucía, before it was overrun by Franco’s troops early in the war, many village communes were set up, abolishing money, collectivizing the land, and attempting the direct exchange of goods. They set up plans to eradicate illiteracy and to provide elementary medical services. Free and equal poverty became the ideal. Having experienced centuries of poverty and oppression, they were notable for their austere moral fervour and revolutionary idealism.
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In general, the CNT syndicates were turned into popular assemblies of the entire population, often including women and children. The assemblies would elect an administrative committee which would be entirely accountable to the assemblies. Decision making was thus shared between the village or town assemblies and the CNT committees which were concerned with the day-to-day running. They operated through what might be called a system of ‘voluntary authority’; no one was forced to join or remain a member of the collective, but was subject to the authority of the general assembly, and in most cases, to the local committees. Regional federations were set up to co-ordinate the collectives.
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In most areas, ‘individualist’ peasants were allowed to cultivate their own plots of land if they preferred and in some areas had consumer tickets
printed especially for them. The members of the collectives wanted to persuade people to join them by example and not by force, although the powerful influence of public opinion played a role. Most of the collectives moved towards the communist goal of distribution according to need. New methods of cultivation were tried and overall production of agricultural production increased, despite the loss of labour to the war effort.
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In the cities, the CNT continued production with remarkable efficiency, considering the difficulties with supplies and in many cases the loss of the entire management structure and many technicians.
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In some cases, owners remained but were directed by the elected committees. In Catalunya, which had seventy per cent of Spain’s total industry, entire branches of industry (such as textiles and glass) were reorganized into larger units. A war industry, with its chemical plants to back it up, had to be created. In Barcelona, which was the centre of urban collectivization, the public services and industries were taken over and run with great success in such a large and complex city. From July until October 1936, virtually all production and distribution were under workers’ control.

Even as late as the summer of 1937, Fenner Brockway, Secretary of the British Independent Labour Party, reported after a visit that it was evident that the CNT was the largest and most vital of the working-class organizations in Spain. He was

Brockway also observed that ‘the great solidarity that existed among the Anarchists was due to each individual relying on his own strength and not depending on leadership’.
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In the long run, the anarchists might have lost the war, but their successful collectivization of the land and industry remained their most enduring and constructive achievement.

There were of course difficulties which sympathetic visitors did not always see. Relations between different enterprises were often casual, and some collectives continued to compete as if they were still privately owned. Wages fluctuated in different factories even within the same industry. With the Madrid government refusing to release funds from the gold reserve (the second largest in the world), there was a shortage of capital and materials.

The revolutionary process was halted on 24 October 1936 when the
provisional government of Catalunya, the Generalitat, issued a Collectivization Decree which recognized the collectives, but tried to bring them under government and not workers’ control. It not only checked their further development but restricted collectivization of industry to those enterprises employing more than a hundred workers. In privately owned factories a Workers’ Control Committee was established to increase production and ensure strict discipline. A planning and co-ordinating body called the Economic Council (with powers of compulsion as the ultimate industrial authority) and a Council of Enterprises (with workers’ representatives joined by a ‘controller’ from the Generalitat) were set up. They both reflected the drift towards central government control.

Yet for all the restrictions of a wartime economy, Orwell for one was deeply impressed in Barcelona by the spectacle of a vibrant city where ‘the working class was in the saddle’.
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Everyday relations were transformed. Men called each other by the familiar
Tú.

Women participated on a mass scale in the revolution. In the early part of the war, they fought alongside men as a matter of course, and took part in the communal decision-making in the village assemblies. Many wanted to replace legal marriage with ‘free unions’ based on mutual trust and shared responsibility. The more active feminists formed a libertarian group called Mujeres Libres which worked towards freeing women from their passivity, ignorance and exploitation and sought a co-operative understanding between men and women. By the end of September 1936 they had seven labour sections and brigades.
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The liberation of women however was only partial: they were often paid a lower rate than men in the collectives; 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.

The experiment however was short-lived. The CNT-run factories were unable to provide the militias with the necessary equipment because of the shortage of raw supplies. They failed to win the support of the majority of the working class, and their attempt to develop the social revolution was checked by the war with Franco’s army and the struggle with other Republican factions, notably the Communists. In September 1936 the Madrid paper of the CNT was still insisting that ‘the libertarian transformation of society can only take place as a result of the abolition of the state and the control of the economy by the working class’.
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Yet towards the end of October, as Franco’s troops were closing in on Madrid, the CNT in Barcelona agreed with the UGT to accept the need for a unified command, military discipline, and conscription. It also halted the expropriation of small
proprietors and businesses. The CNT-FAI in Barcelona not only had a Propaganda Bureau in which members were expected to toe the line, but also set up a School for Militants which smacked of vanguard elitism.

The anarchist leaders further checked the social revolution by their collaboration with government. Some joined in November 1936 the Generalitat of Catalunya, with the feeble excuse that it was a regional defence council. Four leaders of the CNT then became ministers in the socialist government of Largo Caballero (known as the ‘Spanish Lenin’) in December, breaking at a stroke the honoured tradition of abstention from all forms of parliamentary politics. Juan López and Juan Peiró were made Ministers of Commerce and Industry respectively. The FAI militant García Oliver accepted the post of Minister of Justice; he introduced some liberal reforms, but was reduced to defending work camps for political prisoners.

After much agonizing the anarchist intellectual Federica Montseny became Minister of Health even though she had always believed that ‘the state could achieve absolutely nothing, that the words Government and Authority meant the negation of any possibility of liberty for individuals and peoples’.
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The strength of the CNT had always lain in its rejection of the State and political intrigue. It was independent of political parties and committed to the revolution through direct action. In an unparalleled bout of dissimulation, the CNT daily paper
Solidaridad Obrera
declared that, at the very moment its leaders joined Caballero, the government ‘as a regulating instrument of the organisms of the State, has ceased to be an oppressive force against the working class, just as the State no longer represents the organism which divides society into classes’.
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