1970.
5 La autogestión en la España revolucionaria, Madrid, La Piqueta, 1977.
6 Federica Montseny, Mi experiencia en el Ministerio de Sanidad y Asistencia Social, Valencia, Sección de Información y propaganda de la CNT, 1937, p. 6.
7 Dolors Marín, Ministros anarquistas: la CNT en el gobierno de la II República (1936–1939), Barcelona, Random House, 2005, pp. 245–246.
Introduction: Self-Management and Anarcho-Syndicalism
An army revolt erupted in the Spanish protectorate in Morocco and in the Canaries on 17 July 1936 as a backlash against the Popular Front’s victory in the elections that February. The united right—including Gil Robles’s very proper CEDA party; the Falange with the laughable vote scored by its leader José Antonio Primo de Rivera in those elections and its prolific record of violent attacks; the Don Juan de Borbón-supporting monarchists and the dissident monarchists of the Carlist stripe with their requeté paramilitary groups in Navarra; most of the latifundists of Old and New Castile, Extremadura and Andalusia and virtually the entire upper echelons of the Catholic Church (except in the Basque Country and Catalonia)—fell into line behind the coup-makers (golpistas) who were led by generals Mola, Sanjurjo, Franco and the like.
It is to be borne in mind that the action must be violent in the extreme so as to shatter (as quickly as possible) the will of an enemy who is strong and well organized. Naturally, all leading lights of the political parties, societies or trade unions not committed to the Movimiento are to be jailed and exemplary punishment inflicted upon said individuals in order to snuff out acts of defiance or strikes…we must spread a climate of terror. [Secret Order No 1, signed by Mola in Madrid on 25 May 1936, the originally planned date for the coup.]
What lay behind such violence? General Gallifet set the example with his repression of the Paris Commune, where upwards of 30,000 children, women and men were shot down: capitalism needs its workforce terror-stricken, domesticated and decapitated.
The republican government, made up of the centre left parties and PSOE (Partido Socialista Obrero Español /Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party), had been very naive about the right back in 1931, and failed to purge the previous regime’s forces of repression or to implement immediate social reforms in the countryside and in industry (as they had been promising they would just before they came to power). In the face of a right that made no bones about its admiration for Mussolini’s fascism and its sympathies for Hitler’s Germany, the republican government of 1936 proved incapable of devising an effective defensive strategy or of taking self-preservation measures.
Trade union militants and a few leftist groups were the galvanising factors driving the resistance of masses of workers and the odd segment of the republican forces of repression. And, paradoxically, the workers saw off the golpistas across more than half the country, which is why Mussolini and Hitler (and, to a lesser extent, Portugal’s Salazar) rushed in thousands of soldiers and impressive heavy military equipment.
Hitler, Mussolini and Salazar’s well-known contempt and disrespect for constitutional or international law, the grotesque ‘Non-Intervention’ policy adopted by France and Great Britain, the early leaks about genocidal slaughter of leftist militants throughout ‘rebel’ Spain and especially in Badajoz, triggered feelings of outrage and repugnance in workers who entrenched their gains and immediately converted the economy to meet the needs of those who had until so recently been overlooked.
Abroad, those same factors inspired many to assist the Spanish workers who were not only standing up to the rightwing, Catholic fascist crew but who had spontaneously taken over the means of production across much of republican Spain.
Hence the arrival in Spain of tens of thousands of genuine volunteers (as opposed to fascist mercenaries and Soviet ‘advisors’ and their cohorts from a number of communist parties in exile in France) from a range of nations, especially the Anglophone world. Among those front-line fighters, one of the most committed and thoughtful, albeit a man very modest and taciturn in the ranks of his Spanish comrades (because of the language difficulty no doubt), was George Orwell. Very many of these volunteers irrigated the soil of Spain with their blood (Orwell for one) or ended up buried there.
There are countless accounts in dozens of languages and particularly in English, emanating from both combatants and historians and researchers. I personally have drunk deeply of Burnett Bolloten’s erudite technique of backing every claim up with data, and checking out most of the historians’ quotations against the original sources. A reading of Vernon Richards’s Lessons of the Spanish Revolution, Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia and Gerald Brenan’s The Spanish Labyrinth (a positive inspiration to anyone unfamiliar with Díaz del Moral’s 1923 essay “Historia de las agitaciones campesinas andaluzas”, not to mention that it is an interesting and honest book) has proved enlightening. I relished and continue to relish my friend Noam Chomsky’s essay on the academic blindspots of bourgeois historians (taking as his example Gabriel Jackson’s book on the Spanish Civil War) in American Power and the New Mandarins (1969) and his comment that “a deep bias against social revolution in Spain and a commitment to the values and social order of liberal bourgeois democracy has led the author to misrepresent crucial events and to overlook major historical currents”. Equally laudable are his many references to the impromptu achievements of the Spanish workers during the Spanish Revolution.
“A day will come when we will have to sum up the lessons of experience thrown up by our revolution”, Abad de Santillán, Por qué perdimos la guerra (Madrid 1975), p. 78.
“The anarchists themselves, who were and are most concerned to propagandize the work of the collectives, have produced at best only very limited surveys of them. Eye-witness accounts have also a fragmentary quality which makes generalization from them difficult”, Stephen John Brademas, Revolution and Social Revolution: Contribution to the history of the Anarcho-syndicalist Movement in Spain 1930–1937 (Oxford, typewritten thesis, 1953), p. 313.
“In spite of sabotage from bourgeois republicans, some two million workers ran the factories and harvested the crops and tended the land, turning the capitalist consumer economy into a war economy. In the midst of revolution, and its contradictions and controversy, these were workers who knew that they were not prepared to suffer any longer, that they were trying to build a new life, having started on the basis of past experience by rejecting the assumption that their leaders might approve, because in such circumstances ‘order and discipline’ is simply a weapon in the armoury of the traitors who would disarm the people and reintroduce the police who will stand guard over their property. There is only one yardstick by which the Revolution can be judged: the workers’ conditions, their standard of living and their power. And only in Spain had the workers sufficient clarity and strength thanks to their anarcho-syndicalist training to pursue their ideal of emancipation in the sphere of the economy”, foreword to the French translation of Vernon Richards’s Lessons of the Spanish Revolution (1973, revised 2009).
The three quotations above address a double reality: a dearth of information and deliberate misinformation. Caught up in a tunnel-visioned struggle against Francoism, teetering between hopes of evolution or revolution, Spanish anarcho-syndicalists—with the odd exception—forgot to publicise their ventures into self-management, just as their Russian brethren banished from the USSR twenty years previously had done.
The official reporters and historians—in the pay of the masters of capitalist bounty or the communist parties (Moscow once upon a time, and these days Beijing)—are not at liberty
