alternated between such work and trade union activity within France’s home-grown CNT (since 1994). My own ideology is not the anarchism that customarily embraces differing tendencies within a single whole, with the inevitable frictions and impediments for one and all. I prefer to describe myself as an anarcho-syndicalist, in the knowledge that the practice of solidarity and direct action is more important than any label, as was seen in the Spain of 1936 and as can be found among critical piquetero sectors in today’s Argentina.
Frank Mintz, February 2009
8 Bakunin, The Secret Statutes of the Alliance: The Programme and Purpose of the revolutionary organisation, the International Brotherhood, 1868.
9 Bakunin, “The Policy of the International” in L’Égalité, No 31, 21 August 1869.
10 Ever since I first came to grips with the question of the Spanish Revolution, back in 1936, I have been indebted to the Noir et Rouge group, specially Christian Lagant and Todor Mitev; my colleagues Aristide Rumeau, Rafael Pujol Marigot, Josep Fornas; my anarchist or anarcho-syndicalism comrades Antonia Fontanillas, Fernando Gómez Peláez, Gueorgui Balkanski, Rudolf de Jong, Renée Lamberet, José Llop, Valerio Mas and Liberto Sarrau. Subsequently joined by Simone Guittard, the comrades from the Paris-based …editions CNT-RP, the team at the International Institute for Social History in Amsterdam, the friends and comrades from ‘Traficantes de Sueños’ in Madrid, the CGT of Spain and ‘Anarres’ in Buenos Aires.
11 The translation of this book by the Chilean comrade Laín Díez was rejected for publication in the 1960s by the Argentinean anarchist publishing house Proyección as unduly critical of the CNT.
12 I have known exceptional people, one-time Leninists or Leninist faithful who have been open-minded and ‘sound’ and who saw eye to eye with me in exposing oppression and the bourgeoisie in the light of their ideology. My criticisms are directed at the body of doctrine rather than at those who genuinely strive for a better world (and this goes also for the followers of any religion, as long as they are tolerant and ‘sound’).
Chapter One: Introducing the Anarcho-Syndicalist Movement, the CNT
“The Russian revolution, which is the first historical experiment on the model of the mass strike, not merely does not afford a vindication of Anarchism but actually means the historical liquidation of Anarchism”. [1905]13
“The Spanish peasant is even more of an individualist than the French peasant: he is haughtier, prouder”. [1927]14
Subsequent historical events made nonsense of both of the above quotes, the first of which emanates from a Marxist and the second from a bourgeois advocate of cooperatives. They are enlightening as to the shortcomings of supposedly scientific or universal analyses that amount to nothing more than “cover” for subjective personal opinion (not to mention outright lies, as witness those ‘scientific’ studies justifying genetic modification or denying global warming, etc.).
Rather than delving into the facts and figures of Spanish anarcho-syndicalism, it might be wiser to explain how and why it came to be so strong.
From without and from within: the reasons behind the endurance of anarchist trade unionism (or, from the 1930s onwards, anarcho-syndicalism) in Spain, seen through the eyes of outsiders and insiders.
One logical question that arises is: why was anarchism so strong in Spain from the late-nineteenth century through to 1936, when it had vanished elsewhere? The question becomes a lot clearer when we note that in the United States during the same period the workers’ movement was anarchist as well—as witness the Haymarket Martyrs—and it would effectively remain such in the form of the IWW, which subscribed to no particular ideology and no political party, but championed direct action and working-class solidarity (“an injury to one is an injury to all”).
In Spain, there was a labor, socially minded anarchism just as there was in the USA. This was not the anarchism of some Bohemian intellectuals or navel-gazing individualists. By the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, initially in France, and then in Russia with the soviets of 1905, labor used direct-action tactics and had a mistrust of the parties of the left. Such was the effect of this repudiation that, in April 1917, Lenin had to oppose his own party’s central committee and push through the anarchist watchphrase of “All power to the soviets” in order to win power by means of manipulation (through trade union officials—paid officials—and self-styled workers’ leaders like Trotsky) and through the creation in 1917 of the Cheka in order to end the notion of a horizontal revolution benefiting the workers themselves and establish instead a nomenklatura (a privileged class within or dependent upon the Party) along with the NEP,15 and privileges for a new, Red class.
Anarcho-syndicalism and the Spartakists were on the rise in Germany between 1918 and the end of the 1920s, when they were swept aside by armed socialists and right-wingers, not to mention Nazi and capitalist pressures.
And if this labor-based, socially minded anarchism petered out, or almost, within the proletarian movement in many countries such as the USA, France and the USSR, this was due to murder, heavy sentencing and huge fines, to the judges and the bosses, to corruption and gangsterish pressures brought to bear by reformist trade unions and the gulags of “actually existing” socialism.
In Spain, anarcho-syndicalism’s sway can be explained first in terms of the make-up of the CNT, the political and social extraction of its membership and the determination and organisation without which nothing durable can be achieved. Whilst the goal of the CNT was libertarian communism as defined by Bakunin, Kropotkin and the like, the union was open to all workers, regardless of political or religious differences. It was notable that Spanish workers made their choice by espousing libertarian tactics against the oligarchy. In Spain, anarcho-syndicalism’s sway over artists, writers and the petite bourgeoisie was less than was the case in France. Terrorism was also less of a factor in Spain than in France, Italy or Russia. Individualists and attempts to launch communes were less also, contrary to the experiences in France and Russia.
In order to gloss over the repression of anarchism in many countries, historians ask why anarchist influence was so strong in Spain (for the Marxists, see Appendix XV below, page 286).
On the subject of anarchism, Gerald Brenan, a fine English Hispanist, borrowed heavily from Díaz del Moral (whose ideas are set out here) and argued that anarchism reflected millenarianism, with a yearning for the egalitarianism of the Middle Ages. Hugh Thomas, James Joll, Eric Hobsbawm (who serves it up in a Marxist sauce) and Nazario González however have knowingly rehearsed the Díaz del Moral line without acknowledgment.
Not that the anarchists’ own views of the reasons for their success should be immune from criticism. Alongside the rather accurate overall analysis from Renée Lamberet who highlighted the natural geographical barriers suited to federalist ideas, the oppressiveness of iniquitous exploitation in an industrial and agricultural setting or the gravitas of Spanish workers, we find far-fetched explanations invoking the “temperamental anarchism of Spaniards”,16 not to mention newspaper articles talking about the death-defying CNT, the phoenix risen from the ashes, etc.
With a degree of success, Brenan strove to delineate
