Spanish anarchist exiles in Paris, Frank is in the tradition of the other great French activist-historian and eye-witness Gaston Leval (Pierre Robert Piller).3 Mintz has built on Leval’s eye witness account of the collectives by subjecting the revolutionary process to a deeper analysis in order to provide a series of historical reflections. From the outset, he battled against the obstruction of those with an interest in preserving the silence on the Spanish revolution—Soviet archivists didn’t trouble to reply to his written requests for access to their holdings. Undeterred, Frank’s book appeared first in French as L’autogestion dans l’Espagne révolutionnaire, in 1970,4 and in Spanish, shortly after Franco’s death.5
By foregrounding the role of revolutionary collectives, this book was at loggerheads with the Francoist-Stalinist-Liberal, an important work that recuperated the experience of the struggle of thousands of anonymous workers for social and economic justice. It is concerned with questions such as why did self-management assume the proportions it took in Spain? How did it develop? Who organised the collectives? Were they spontaneous or forced? What motivated the collectivisers? What were their consequences and achievements? If compared with other attempts at collectivisation, did the Spanish case possess any unique characteristics?
When it comes to addressing why this movement emerged, the book starts by locating the collectivisations in terms of the local context and in relation to the CNT’s culture of self-organisation and self-expression. Accordingly, when the fascist-military coup of July 1936 was put down by a combination of armed workers’ militia and the police and military units that remained loyal to the republican government, profound revolutionary tensions within the heart of Spanish society exploded. The failed coup fractured the authority of the republican state, which now lost its monopoly of armed power and it was in these circumstances that agrarian and urban workers took over the means of production. None of the leaders of the leftist or trade union organisations called for the revolution: the collectivisations were the spontaneous remarkable response of legions of anonymous labourers to the practical issue of getting production on the land and in the factories up and running again.
Certainly many thousands of these workers were immersed in revolutionary syndicalist and anarchist ideas. But perhaps most remarkable of all, as you will read ahead, was that there were collectives organised by labourers who we might label ‘spontaneous anarchists’, who had no idea that they were organising along anarchist lines. This was most evident in rural Castile and Extremadura, where the anarchist tradition was weaker and where the dominant agrarian unions were mainly socialist in inspiration. This is all testimony to the profound autonomy of Spanish workers who embarked on a collective experiment that developed independently of the leaders of the union organisations. Reflecting the importance of workers’ economic organisations over political parties, the collectivisations were, for the most part, impelled by grassroots anarchist and socialist trade unionists. But this was a genuinely popular revolution that drew in many non-affiliated workers. We must also recognise the important contribution of members of the dissident, anti-Stalinist communist party, the POUM, and, in some cases, of rank-and-file activists from the Stalinist PCE, even though its leaders were formally hostile to the revolution. In short, this was a revolution that occurred beyond the control of the leadership of the Spanish workers’ and left-wing organisations, including those of anarchist tradition; it was a leaderless revolution, characterised by a high level of direct democracy.
This book is essential reading for anyone interested in either the Spanish revolution or the history of workers’ self-management. It provides a global survey of the collectivisation process across Spain, revealing the scope and achievements of this far-reaching revolution, that was nothing less than the material expression of the will of hundreds of thousands of workers to seize control of their destiny and eliminate capitalism. In response to those who cling to the view that private property offers the only effective economic model, here we have eloquent proof of the creative energies of downtrodden, sometimes illiterate, pariahs of their capacity to run a complex economy while reconstituting everyday life in a non-hierarchical manner; of their readiness to confront historic problems, such as the problems of coordination between urban and rural economies; and the quest to raise the productivity of a backward agricultural system. Interestingly, the published testimonies of several landowners and industrialists who later regained their land and factories, thanks to Franco’s victory in the civil war, pointed to the vast economic improvements introduced by the collectivisers. And all this was the more audacious since it occurred in the context of a violent civil war that ultimately devoured the revolution.
We also see here the forces allied against the collectives, both inside and outside the anarchist movement. In this respect, the author had unrivalled access to anarchist exiles in France, whose oral testimony constitutes a precious historical resource, especially vital when it comes to giving a voice to the truncated fight for justice of the defeated and compiling the fragments of their broken and unfulfilled hopes. Inevitably, these themes presuppose some discussion of the bureaucratisation of the CNT, how its leaders prioritised the civil war over the revolution and embraced the ideology of ‘circumstantialism’ to justify the entrance of anarchist ministers in government.
When we look back at how the anarchist ministers conspired in the destruction of the revolution, ensuring the militarisation of the militias and the extension of state control over the collectives, it seems a bitter irony that the likes of Juan García Oliver and Federica Montseny defended joining the republican government as a means of strengthening the revolution from a position of power—justifications that seem nothing short of delusional and vain today. Certainly, we cannot dispute Montseny’s judgement that for her, anti-fascism had become ‘something more important than the realisation of our own ideals’.6 As well as turning their backs on ideals, the collaborationist sector of the CNT distanced itself from the movement’s traditions of internal democracy: the decision to join the government was never ratified by the organisation in an open assembly or congress. The same bureaucratic sleight of hand also ensured that the rebellion of the anarchist opposition to ‘governmentalism’ was contained, isolated and then defeated.
Attacked by their natural enemies and by those leading what they had come to identify as their organisations, the defeat of the revolutionaries of 1936 was doubly bitter. In 1999 Dolors Marín asked Concha Liaño, a founder of Mujeres Libres, if all the defeat and betrayal that served as a prelude to the hardships of exile had been worthwhile. With tears in her eyes Liaño replied: “Yes. We gave a lesson to the world. We showed that you can live communally, sharing everything there is. That you can educate people in freedom and without punishing our children, that it is possible to appreciate nature and acquire culture. Yes, we did all this for a very short while, but we gave a lesson to the world”.7 This book, so pregnant with observations about how socio-economic transformation occurs, presents this same lesson for a new generation.
Chris Ealham, Madrid, July 2010
1 Dolores Ibárruri et. al., Guerra y revolución en España, 1936–1939, Moscow, Progreso, 1966–1971, 4 vols. (vol. 1, p. 256).
2 Noam Chomsky, American Power and the New Mandarins, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1969, p. 64.
3 Gaston Leval, Collectives in the Spanish Revolution, London, Freedom Press, 1975.
4 L’autogestion dans
