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Title: Spain ’36
Author: David Porter
Date: 1986, Summer
Language: en
Topics: Spain, Spanish revolution, anarchist movement, Fifth Estate, Fifth Estate #323
Source: Fifth Estate #323, Summer, 1986, retrieved August 19, 2019 from https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/323-summer-1986/spain-36/

David Porter

Spain ’36

Imagine the United States split regionally into conservative-fascist and

leftist popular front-anarchist zones. Civil war rages at the shifting

boundary lines with half the country under the domination of an

insurgent military right-wing junta determined to destroy the elected

government and all individuals and organizations of the left. Then

imagine that simultaneously, behind the lines in the popular front zone

(say, most of the East and West coasts), there are widespread

decentralized efforts to transform the society through economic and

social collectivization in producers’ cooperatives, free schools, free

health centers, neighborhood councils, local popular assemblies-the

assumption of community self-responsibility through direct action from

the bottom up.

Imagine also that the organizations and individuals behind such efforts

are constantly threatened with imprisonment or assassination by those in

the official popular front government. Imagine all of this with an

intensity at least four times greater than the enthusiasm, the

polarization and the confrontations of the 1960’s. At this point, we can

begin to appreciate the dimensions of the Spanish revolution of 50 years

ago.

How and why did the civil war begin? How could people behind the lines

have the energy and vision, in the midst of a civil war, to carry out

the massive efforts of social transformation? From where did such

organizations and individuals emerge, with the strength and purpose to

attempt such efforts in the face of repression from the very government

they were allied with in the civil war? What was the quality of freedom

in the experiments of the new society themselves? And, despite the

impressive release of liberatory instincts and practice, what were its

limitations, its compromises, and the causes of its ultimate collapse

three years later? Could there have been alternative approaches, more

positive and lasting?

The Spanish revolution was the largest-scale and most intense testing

place of the relevance and strength of anarchist ideas in the modern

world. In the midst of the international context of mounting fascist

strength and aggression in the late 1930’s, and faced with an attempted

military coup d’etat supported by fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, the

Spanish anarchist movement organized the most significant and immediate

resistance.

For nearly the next three years anarchists took the greatest initiative

in creating massive social experiments which put their libertarian

vision into practice. During that time, tens of thousands of anarchists

were slaughtered at the front lines fighting the fascists, while the

official Loyalist government increasingly sabotaged efforts of

revolutionary transformation behind the lines and persecuted its leading

forces. Later, anarchists even participated in official government

positions from the national cabinet level on down, and,

organizationally, the anarchist movement began to develop hierarchical

tendencies contradictory to its ideals. The Spanish revolution was the

time of the greatest brilliance of anarchist accomplishments and also

the time of greatest contradiction and self-critique.

Following the fall of the right-wing Primo de Rivera dictatorship in

1930 and the monarchy itself in 1931, the second republic assumed the

political task of organizing the continuing early industrialization of

Spanish society and preventing the class conflict inherent in this

process from exploding into open warfare. Critically located within this

context was the anarchist-organized Confederación Nacional del Trabajo,

the CNT. By the mid-1930’s, its membership of 1.5 million impoverished

peasants and urban workers represented a strong moral and actively

political movement several generations old, deeply connecting the

conscious 19th century anarchist ideological tradition with the

underlying Spanish cultural instincts of spontaneity,

anti-authoritarianism and collective solidarity.

Strongly influenced by a separate militant anarchist political grouping,

the Federación Anarquista Ibérica (FAI) which had some 35,000 members by

1936, the CNT was a formidable political presence-far more significantly

placed than anarchists in any other part of the world. Roughly equal in

strength, the CNT and the reformist-led socialist trade union UGT

contained the vast majority of working class families in Spain (total

Spanish population was about 26 million in 1936).

Immediately Took to the Streets

With ideological and direct material support from European fascism, the

Spanish nationalist forces (led by Francisco Franco and other top

generals) attempted their coup d’etat against the recently-elected

moderately leftist popular front government on July 17, 1936. CNT and

FAI members immediately took to the streets with whatever ancient and

inadequate weapons were available in town after town, city after city,

attempting to surround military barracks, to prevent military

occupation. Joined at the street level by thousands of other

anti-fascists as well, this initiative was all the more crucial in the

absence of the central government’s willingness to act. Like its several

successors through early 1939-paralyzed between the desire to stay in

power and its hostility to local empowerment-the Loyalist regime was

effectively dormant in the next few decisive weeks.

Anarchists, socialists, POUMistas (Opposition Communists), and

eventually the Communists (through the influence and prestige of Soviet

aid and “advisors”) formed their own militia units to prevent further

expansion of the zones where the fascist coup had succeeded. In the

northeastern part of Loyalist Spain—Catalonia, Aragon and part of the

Levant—the CNT was the overwhelming majority presence in the working

class. To their great credit, the anarchists refused to impose an

“anarchist society” on the remaining population in these areas, though

they unquestionably had the strength to establish their own regime (as

attempted soon after by the several statist ideologies). Instead, the

great majority of anarchists either fought at the front or constructed

the new society in the rear.

Within several weeks, most farmland in Catalonia and Aragon was

collectivized. Similarly, in Barcelona, units of workers’

self-management operated the vast majority of factories, utilities and

services. Yet the supply and coordination demands of a

traditionally-fought civil war- and the international isolation of

Loyalist Spain from effective support (except for Soviet aid, which

attached its own imperialist conditions) caused many respected

anarchists to take official government posts, to defend coalition with

the anti-fascist popular front at whatever costs, and even to attempt a

form of “democratic centralism” within the anarchist movement itself

(for “greater decision-making efficiency”).

Most anarchists at the regional and local level tried to ignore such

compromises and continued in their own efforts to develop revolutionary

collective experiences at the core of their daily lives. Many, including

large numbers of those most critical of collaboration, were killed off

at the front or imprisoned or murdered by the Loyalist regime and

Communist secret police. The armed anarchist and POUM confrontation with

the Communists and other statists in the Barcelona street fighting of

early May 1937 was the closest this contradiction came to a direct

resolution. Yet the continued determination of anarchists in Aragon to

reconstruct their farm collectives again and again after suppression by

the Loyalist regime was also an amazing example of anarchist tenacity

and courage in an incredibly hostile political context.

Ultimately, the negative side of the Spanish revolution—the internal

contradictions, the triumph of the fascists—raises questions about the

very model of armed social revolution inherited from the 18th and 19th

centuries. How much and what type of change can be accomplished within

one country alone-especially in the face of murderous weapons in the

hands of counter-revolutionaries, authoritarianism and repression by

leftist parties, and amidst a population generally (including many

within the anarchist movement) where a clear anarchist consciousness

does not yet prevail?

The Spanish revolution raises such issues and begins to suggest possible

answers still of relevance today. Beyond this, from the hellish context

of the late 1930s, the immense courage, dignity, constructive energy and

non-hierarchical positive vision shown by the Spanish anarchist movement

cannot be forgotten. From Spain, we can remind ourselves that anarchism

is not simply a cultural current or a practice among small groups or

individuals. Despite tremendous obstacles, it is a consciousness that

can become a powerful and immensely creative large-scale social

presence.