Murray Bookchin Archive

The Anarchist Collectives: Workers' Self-Management in the Spanish Revolution, 1936-1939
Part 1: Background, Chapter 2: The Libertarian Tradition

Written: 1974.
Source: Text from RevoltLib.com.
Transcription/Markup: Andy Carloff
Online Source: RevoltLib.com; 2021

Chapter 2: The Libertarian Tradition

Introduction

A social revolution is neither an accidental happening nor a coup d’etat artificially engineered from above.

It is the culmination of a long period of gestation. Nurtured on the one hand by negative forces, there is rebellion against oppression springing from the inability of the old order to cope with acute economic and social problems. On the other hand there are the positive, contructive forces. The long submerged elements of the new society, freed by the Revolution, emerge as the old society decays and collapses. We are here primarily concerned with these positive constructive tendencies and traditions which will shape the character of the free society.

Spanish anarchism springs from two sources: the inherent libertarian tradition of rural collectives, and the deeply rooted and militantly federalist tendencies which found expression in Bakunin’s anarcho-syndicalist organizational principles. We briefly trace these two sources below.

We conclude this chapter with the summation of an article by the anarchist theoretician Isaac Puente.[18] It is an example of how these two foundations of Spanish anarchism intermesh. He contrasts the state and authoritarian organization with the free association of individuals through libertarian urban industrial and agrarian organization. As he wrote in CNT (October 24, 1933), “We are not interested in changing governments. What we want is to suppress them...” Here, Puente outlines alternatives to the authoritarian organization of society.

The Rural Collectivist Tradition
by Sam Dolgoff

Gerald Brenan has written that “in its roots Spanish Anarchism is rural.” (p. 199) There is indeed a strong agricultural and pastoral tradition in Spain that is anarchistic. This is not, however, all there is to Spanish anarchism, as we shall see in the next section of this chapter. But it is from rural roots that the first libertarian collectives sprang. They were not invented by the anarchists but date back to medieval times.

Agrarian collectivism is traditional in the Iberian Peninsula, as it is among the Berbers and in the ancient Russian mir. The historians Costa and Reparez trace the origins of a great many Iberian collectives... A form of rural libertarian-communism existed in the Iberian Peninsula before the Roman invasion. Not even five centuries of oppression by Catholic kings, the State and the Church have been able to eradicate the spontaneous tendency to establish libertarian communistic communities... (Compo Libre, anarchist magazine, 1936, quoted in Mintz, pp. 34, 35)

The beginnings of collective land tenure are obscure but probably come from many sources--such as the working of land that would only yield to collective efforts, and grants of land to communities of liberated serfs designed to populate certain areas. By the 18^th century there were a great many villages in northern Spain that owned the surrounding land and the villagers would periodically divide it up among themselves. In the Pyrenees there were shepherd communities that had communal pastures.

Rural collectivism was not limited to land tenure alone, as in many other parts of the world. In fact an amazing strength of Spanish collectivism was the tendency of the people to introduce collectivist or cooperative ways of doing things into other aspects of their daily life.

What is, however, remarkable is that in Spain the village communities spontaneously developed on this basis an extensive system of municipal services, to the point of their sometimes reaching an advanced stage of communism. (Brenan, p. 339)

Municipal cooperatives often provided for the needs of village inhabitants: anything from the surgeon to papal indulgences. Guilds provided sickness and old age insurance for their members. Some fishing communities became collectivized as early as the 16^th century. Even early industrial undertakings, like net-making, were collectivized.

Brenan gives impressive examples of these collectives from the investigations of J. Langdon Davies and Joaquin Costa, the greatest historian of agrarian collectivism in Spain. We can do no better than to quote from his example of the village of Port de la Selva in Catalonia. Brenan draws on Davies’ description made shortly before the Civil War and then adds his own historical context:

The village was run by a fishermen’s cooperative. They owned the nets, the boats, the curing factory, the store house, the refrigerating plant, all the shops, the transport lorries, the olive groves and the oil refinery, the café, the theater, and the assembly rooms. They had developed the pósito, or municipal credit fund possessed by every village in Spain, into an insurance against death, accident, and loss of boats. They coined their own money... Port de la Selva was in short a libertarian republic and had achieved the ideal of all those villages of Catalonia, Andalusia and even Castile which at different times during the past century have declared themselves independent and have proceeded to divide up lands and issue their own coinage...[19]

What is interesting is to see how naturally these cooperatives have fitted into the Spanish scene. For Port de la Selva is one of the old fishermen’s communes of Catalonia which have existed from time immemorial... Here then we have a modern productive cooperative grafted on to an ancient communal organization and functioning perfectly. (pp. 337, 338)

There were, of course, other forces at work. Through the years many municipalities lost their ‘democratic qualities as the king, nobles, and rich merchants intervened. The municipality often became an instrument of coercion and state power.

After 1868, anarchist thought began to influence popular dissent. (See “The Anarchist Influence” below) The workers organized themselves into local federations or syndicates. These syndicates provided the organizational basis for revolutionary pressure, and they portended the organizational form of the collectives during the social revolution. They were also identical in every way to the village assembly in many early municipalities.

An important period of revolutionary action in 1918 gives a flavor of the role (as a new form and an old form) that the syndicate played:

That autumn saw therefore the immense majority of agricultural workers of the south and east of Spain, together with the tradesmen and the workers in small local industries, organized in one vast though loose syndicate. The beginning of a peasants’ confederation that would cover the whole of Spain seemed to be in sight. During these years the local syndicates everywhere acquired immense prestige and authority. Their leading men, who sat on the committees, were the real rulers of the districts. The municipality kept only a nominal power. Every Sunday the syndicate would meet in full assembly to discuss local affairs. The whole village attended and anyone who wished to had the right to speak. Resolutions were passed and voting took place by a show of hands. During the rest of the week the committee enforced its will by a system of fines against which an appeal could always be made to the village assembly. What one was witnessing was really the rebirth of the municipality of the early Middle Ages. (Brenan, pp. 180, 181)

Peasant movements on as great or greater a scale launched in the years immediately preceding the Spanish Civil War of 1936 are better known. Franz Mintz cites frustrated peasant rebellions to institute Comunismo Libertario in 43 villages in Granada, Malaga, Almeria, and Jaen.

In January, 1932, the FAI launched an insurrectional movement in the mining region of Upper Llobregat and Cordona... In the Levant at the end of 1932, Bétera, Bugarra, Pedralba, and Ribaroja proclaimed libertarian communism, hoisted the red and black flag, burnt records, and announced the abolition of money, private property, and the ‘exploitation of man by man.’ (Mintz, pp. 11–12, 40–41, 45. He also cites other examples.)

The nature of the Spanish rural collectivist tradition goes well beyond peculiar agrarian conditions, as we have suggested. It was all encompassing, tenacious, and clear about its goals:

There has not been a peasant rising in Andalusia in the last hundred years when the villages did not form communes, divide up the land, abolish money, and declare themselves independent--free, that is, from the interference of “foreign” landlords and police. (Brenan, p. 196)

Similarly, as peasants came to the cities to work in factories, etc., they brought this collectivist tradition with them.

[Industrial workers] ask, first of all, for self-government for their industrial village or syndicate, and then for a shortening of the hours, a reduction in the quantity of the work. They ask for more liberty and more leisure and above all more respect for human dignity, but not necessarily a higher standard of living. (Brenan, p. 196)

We conclude by quoting Brenan once more: “Again one finds the anarchists hastening to restore the groundwork of local life from which Spain in the days of her greatness had sprung.” (p. 202, note N)

The Anarchist Influence
by Sam Dolgoff

The rural collectivist tradition in Spain laid the groundwork for Spanish anarchism. But it was the fundamental principles of anarchism worked out by Bakunin and the libertarian wing of the First International that decisively determined the orientation of the Spanish anarchist movement. The “Declaration of Principles” written by Bakunin on the founding of the International Alliance of Socialist Democracy on Sept. 25, 1868, provides an intellectual basis similar to this rural tradition we have already talked about:

The Alliance declares itself atheist; it seeks the complete and definitive abolition of classes and the political, economic, and social equality of both sexes. It wants the land and the instruments of labor (production), like all other property [not personal belongings], to be converted into the collective property of the whole society for utilization [not ownership] by the workers: that is, by agricultural and industrial federations. It affirms that all existing political and authoritarian states, which are to be reduced to simple administrative functions dealing with public utilities in their respective countries, must eventually be replaced by the worldwide union of free association, agricultural and industrial. (Dolgoff, p. 35)

Later that year, the Alliance was introduced into Spain by Bakunin’s emissary, the Italian revolutionist Giuseppe Fanelli. Though knowing no Spanish, Fanelli was still able in a matter of weeks to lay a firm foundation for the acceptance of Bakunin’s anarchism.

The founders of the International in Spain--men like Farga y Pellicer, Gaspar Sentiñon, Anselmo Lorenzo, Francisco Mora, González Morago, and José Garcia Viñas--were all members of the Bakuninist Alliance. By the middle of 1870 the Spanish Federation of the International had over 20,000 members:

a new organization based solely upon the interests, the needs and the natural preferences of the populations--having no other principle but the free federation of individuals into communes, of communes into provinces, of provinces into nations, and finally of the nations into the United States of Europe first, and of the entire world eventually. (“Federalism, Socialism, Anti-Theologism”, in Dolgoff, pp. 104, 105 )

The resolutions of the libertarian sections of the International constituted the “Magna Carta” of Spanish anarcho-syndicalism. The important “Program of the Alliance,” for instance, differentiated the organization of the masses from the state and emphasized the need for these organizational forms to be consonant with the daily life of the worker. Bakunin summarized this important point:

The organization of the International ... will take on an essentially different character from the organization of the state. Just as the state is authoritarian, artificial, violent, foreign, and hostile to the natural development of the popular instincts, so must the organization of the International conform in all respects to these instincts and these interests. But what is the organization of the masses? It is an organization based on the various functions of daily life and of different kinds of labor. It is the organization by professions and trades. Once all the different industries are represented in the International, including the cultivation of the land, its organization, the organization of the mass of the people, will have been achieved.

The organization of the trade sections and their representation in the Chambers of Labor [federations of unions] creates a great academy in which all the workers can and must study economic science; these sections also bear in themselves the living seeds of the new society which is to replace the old world. They are creating not only the ideas, but also the facts of the future itself. (Dolgoff, p. 255)

In the Spanish case these ‘seeds’ did allow for the intense learning and popular intelligence that actually produced a social revolution.

At the notorious Hague Congress of the International in 1872, these libertarian principles were repudiated by the Marxist faction and Bakunin, Guillaume, and the libertarian Jura Federation were expelled. The “Resolutions of the Congress of Saint-Imier” a few days later reconstituted the libertarian International. The Spanish Federations of the International endorsed these resolutions during Christmas week in Cordova, thereby aligning themselves with the libertarians and re-emphasizing their anti-authoritarian direction. The third resolution reads:

The economic aspiration of the proletariat can have no other aim than the establishment of absolutely free organizations and federations, based on the labor equally of all and absolutely separate and independent from every political state government; and that these organizations and federations can be created only by the spontaneous action of the proletariat itself, that is, by the trade bodies and the autonomous communes...

For these reasons, the Congress of Saint-Imier declares:

1) That the destruction of all political power is the first task of the proletariat;

2) That the establishment of a so-called “provisional” (temporary) revolutionary authority to achieve this destruction can be nothing but a new deception and would be just as dangerous for the proletariat as any existing government. (Dolgoff, pp. 390, 391)

The last resolution under the heading “Organization of Labor Statistics” recommends the naming of a commission which would present to the Congress “a plan for the universal resistance of labor against capitalism and the state” and complete statistics on work to “expedite this struggle and guide labor” in social reconstruction. In this connection, the resolution praised the efforts of the “Spanish section as up to now the best ... “

Our purpose here has been to give a feel for the content of anarchist thought, especially Bakunin’s, and a sense of its influence on Spain. These two elements, Bakunin’s anarchist influence and the native Spanish collectivist tradition spoken of before, set the stage for the Spanish anarchists to actually “expedite this struggle and guide labor” in social reconstruction.

A word needs to be said about the intense preoccupation of the Spanish anarchists with libertarian reconstruction of society. It has been called an “obsession” and not altogether without reason. For example, under the following headings the Saragossa Congress in May, 1936 defined in considerable detail the organization and structure of Comunismo Libertario and the necessary initial steps leading toward the full realization of the new society: “Constructive Conception of the Revolution,” “The Establishment of Communes, Their Function and Structure,” “Plan of Economic Organization,” “Coordination and Exchange,” “Economic Conception of the Revolution,” “Federation of Industrial and Agricultural Associations,” “Art, Culture and Education.” In short, practically the whole range of problems likely to affect the Revolution were discussed including relations with non-libertarian individuals and groupings, crime, delinquency, equality of sexes, individual rights, etc.

However, it was this very “obsession” that produced these resolutions and others dealing with the organization of the new society that were worked out by the various congresses of the Spanish sections of the International (in 1870, 1871, 1872, 1882, and up to and including the Saragossa Congress in May, 1936, only two months before the Civil War): resolutions that were, without major modifications put into effect by the agrarian collectives and socialized industries during the Spanish Revolution.

In a largely illiterate country, tremendous quantities of literature on social revolution were disseminated and read many times over. The resolutions mentioned above were more than just show pieces; they were widely discussed. There were tens of thousands of books, pamphlets and tracts, vast and daring cultural and popular educational experiments (the Ferrer schools) that reached into almost every village and hamlet throughout Spain.

The proclamation of the Spanish Republic in 1931, led to an outburst of “anticipatory” writings: Peirats lists about fifty titles, stressing that there were many more... a proliferation of writings which contributed greatly to preparing the people for a revolutionary road. (Guérin, p. 121)

Newspapers and periodicals were of enormous importance also. “By the end of 1918 more than fifty towns in Andalusia had libertarian newspapers of their own. (Brenan, p. 179) By 1934 the CNT attained a membership of 1,500,000 and the anarchist press blanketed Spain. In Barcelona the CNT published a daily, Solidaridad Obrera, with a circulation of 30,000. Tierra y Libertad of Barcelona (a magazine) reached a circulation of 20,000; Vida Obrera of Gijon, El Productor of Seville, and Acción y Cultura of Saragossa had large circulations. The magazines La Revista Blanca, Tiempos Nuevos, and Estudios reached circulations of 5000, 15,000, and 75,000 respectively. This has not even begun to exhaust the list.[20]

Seventy-five years of such persistent agitation and unflinching revolutionary struggle not only inspired the workers and peasants to repulse the fascists but also prepared them for the great constructive work of the Spanish libertarian revolution.

The Political and Economic Organization of Society[21]
by Isaac Puente

Libertarian communism is based upon the economic organization of society, the economic interests being the only kind of social link upon which the interests of all individuals converge. The social organization has no other goal but to place in common possession whatever constitutes social wealth (the means of production and the distribution of goods and services) and to make the obligation to contribute to production a common obligation from everyone according to his ability. All non-economic affairs and functions will be left to the private initiative and activity of the individuals and their voluntary groupings without outside interference.

Libertarian communism is the organization of society without the State and without capitalist property relations. To establish libertarian communism it will not be necessary to invent artificial forms of social organization. The new society will emerge “from the shell of the old.” The elements of the future society are already planted in the existing order. They are the Syndicate and the Free Commune (sometimes called “Free Municipality”) which are old, deeply rooted non-statist popular institutions spontaneously organized, and embracing all towns and villages in both urban and rural areas. The Free Commune is also ideally suited to cope successfully with the problems of social and economic life in libertarian rural communities. Within the Free Commune there is also room for cooperative associations of artisans, farmers and other groups or individuals who prefer to remain independent or form their own associations to meet their own needs (providing of course that they do not exploit hired labor for wages).

Both the Syndicates and the Free Communes, in accordance with federative and democratic procedures, will, by mutual agreement, be free to conduct their own affairs within their own spheres, without interference from any outside authority. This will not be necessary because the workers will, from sheer necessity, (if for no other reason) be obliged to establish their own Federations of Industries to coordinate their multiform economic activities.

Through their syndicates, their Free Communes and their subsidiary coordinating agencies, the workers will take collective possession of all private (not personal) property and collectively administer production and consumption of goods and public services locally, regionally and nationally.

The terms “Libertarian” and “Communism” denote the fusion of two inseparable concepts, the indispensable prerequisites for the free society: collectivism and individual freedom.

The contrast between statist authoritarian political organization and a free social order based upon anarchist communist economic principles cannot be more complete. In order to clarify and illustrate these diametrically opposed conceptions we make the following comparisons:

The Anarchist Collectives | Murray Bookchin Archive