July 1936

THE SPANISH ARMY in Morocco rose in rebellion against the Second Spanish Republic on 17 July 1936. By the following day the long-planned rising, under the leadership of General Sanjurjo and a military directorate consisting of generals Yagüe, Queipo de Llano, Mola and Franco, had spread to the Spanish mainland.

The Spanish anarcho-syndicalist labor organization, the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), had been preparing for the eventuality of a coup for some time. Earlier that year, on 14 February, just two days before the elections which were to bring to power the Popular Front government which precipitated the military uprising, the National Committee of the CNT in Zaragoza issued a prophetic warning to its members as to the likely consequences of a leftist victory in the forthcoming elections. It was a clear statement of intent to the Republican and social democratic bourgeoisie as well as to the military plotters and the landed oligarchy, whose interests they served, that the most powerful labor union in Spain would respond with the ultimate expression of working class power — social revolution:

“On a war footing, proletariat, against the monarchist and fascist conspiracy! – Day by day the suspicion is growing that rightist elements are ready to provoke intervention by the military … Insurrection has been deferred, pending the outcome of the elections. They are to implement their theoretical scheme of prevention should victory at the polls go to the left. Furthermore, we have no hesitation in recommending that, wheresoever the legionnaires of tyranny may launch armed insurrection, an understanding be unhesitatingly reached with antifascist groups, vigorous precautions being taken to ensure that the defensive contribution of the masses may lead to real social revolution under the auspices of Libertarian Communism. Should the conspirators open fire, the act of opposition must be pursued to its utmost consequences without the liberal bourgeoisie and its Marxist allies being countenanced in their desire to apply the brakes, in the event of the fascist rebellion’s being defeated in its first stages … in the course of the people’s victory its democratic illusions would be dispelled; should it go otherwise, the nightmare of dictatorship will annihilate us. No matter who opens the hostilities seriously, democracy will perish between two fires because it is irrelevant and has no place on the field of battle. Either fascism or social revolution. Defeat of the former is a duty incumbent upon the whole proletariat and all freedom lovers, weapons in hand: that the revolution should be social and libertarian ought to be the most profound preoccupation of members of the Confederation …”

Precise information as to the date of the rising had been obtained on July 13 by CNT–FAI agents in the barracks. The date was later confirmed following the arrest of a Guardia Civil officer carrying written orders. The two million strong CNT union and its sister organization, the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI), began to speed up their plans to resist the military and oligarchic conspiracy. In line with the February warning of the National Committee of the CNT, militants met frequently in their Locals throughout Spain to prepare for the inevitable confrontation with the rebels.

On 16 July the CNT held a regional assembly in Catalonia to coordinate resistance plans. Arms were requested of the Generalidad (the regional government of Catalonia), but these were refused and the CNT–FAI patrols on the streets were arrested. Censorship of Solidaridad Obrera prevented publication of a FAI manifesto instructing all anarchist groups to join the CNT’s Defense Committees to form a united front. The text was printed as a poster and distributed throughout the region.

In spite of the by now irrefutable evidence that advanced preparations for a military coup were under way, neither Prime Minister Casares Quiroga nor President Lluis Companys of the Catalan Generalidad were prepared to issue arms to the only organized and reliable opposition to the military conspirators – the labor unions. This hesitation is hardly surprising given the clearly revolutionary nature of the country’s largest labor union, the CNT. For the middle-class businessmen, civil servants and politicians of the Second Republic the prospect of unleashing a social revolution by arming the people was more frightening than the alternative scenario of a military coup and fascism. Hoping against hope that a last minute compromise could be reached with the military, the government steadfastly refused to countenance arming the people.

In Catalonia the Generalidad had no authority over the army. Federico Escofet, the Barcelona police commissioner explained the dilemma:

“To arm the CNT represented a danger for the Republican regime in Catalonia – as much of a danger to its existence as the military rebellion. Could the Generalidad voluntarily adopt such measures? I believed, for my part that I could not take the initiative with such potentially serious consequences, other than having blind faith in the triumph of the forces of public order. For this reason I did not want to arm the people.

“Companys and I agreed on the convenience of not distributing the arms demanded by the people because the CNT–FAI was the dominant force. These armed elements, who undoubtedly would provide invaluable assistance in the struggle against the rebels, would also endanger the existence of the Republic and the government of the Generalidad. The President warned me to be particularly careful in guarding the armories to ensure there was no repetition of the raids such as those that took place on 6 October 1934. Effectively, the armories were attacked the following day.” [1]

Escofet claims he did not place guards in order not to distract the attentions of the forces of order. He did, however, believe that the government should have armed the socialist trade union, the UGT, whose leaders, in spite of their revolutionary rhetoric, he considered ‘realistic’. Together with the forces of public order these were perceived as being sufficient to contain the rising.

Julian Zugazagoitia, a socialist leader, quotes the following eyewitness account of Casares Quiroga’s final days as premier:

“His ministry is a madhouse and the wildest inmate is the minister himself. He neither eats nor sleeps. He shouts and screams as though possessed. His appearance frightens you, and it would not surprise me if he were to drop dead during one of his frenzied outbursts … He will hear nothing of arming the people and says in the most emphatic terms that anyone who takes it upon himself to do so will be shot.”[2]

In a last ditch attempt to stave off the military rebellion, Premier Quiroga resigned on 18 July. His place was taken by Diego Martínez Barrio, a conservative republican, who also refused to arm the workers. Martínez Barrio did double somersaults in order to reach a compromise solution with the military plotters, offering them ministerial carte blanche. General Mola, who had taken over the leadership of the revolt following the accidental death of General Sanjurjo, was offered the Ministry of War in a proposed government of national reconciliation. Mola, however, made it quite clear to the bourgeois republican Premier that the class lines had been drawn up and that the political situation had reached the point of no return – confrontation was inevitable.

According to Cánovas Cervantes, Mola politely rebuffed Barrio’s desperate offer in a short telephone conversation:

“I am much indebted to you Señor Barrio, for the flattering and undeserved comments which my work and my past service have moved you to. I shall make my reply with the same courtesy and nobility you have used in speaking to me. The government with whose formation you are burdened will not get off the drawing board; should it ever take shape, it will be short lived, and, rather than remedying it, will have served to worsen the situation … You have your masses and I have mine. If you and I were to agree to some deal we should both have betrayed our ideals as well as our men. We should both deserve to be lynched.”

As Mola predicted, the government of Martínez Barrio was short-lived, lasting only one day. In the space of three days, two governments fell rather than hand over arms to the workers. Barrio’s place was taken the following day, July 19, by José Giral who realized that all hopes of a deal were illusory. He had no option but to order weapons to be distributed to the union organizations. Giral’s decree legalized what was by then a fait accompli.

On the evening of July 18, the National Committee of the CNT broadcast an appeal on Radio Madrid to mobilize for war. In conjunction with the UGT, the CNT declared a revolutionary general strike. The previous day, 17 July, the transport workers’ section of the CNT in Barcelona had stormed two ships anchored in the port and expropriated around 200 guns. Groups of workers raided armories and gun shops while antique and dilapidated rifles and revolvers appeared from hiding places under floorboards and attics. The central government in Madrid and the Generalidad who were, even at this late stage, still clinging to the hope that they could reach a settlement with the military, ordered the security forces to recover the weapons seized by the workers.

Police commissioner Escofet sent a company of Assault Guards to recover the stolen arms. Guarner, the officer in charge of the raid on the CNT transport workers’ Local where the arms were being stored, spoke to the anarcho-syndicalist militant Buenaventura Durruti who explained why the arms had been seized:

‘There are times in life when it is impossible to carry out an order, no matter how highly placed the person who gave the order. It is through disobedience that man becomes civilized. In your case, then, civilize yourself by making common cause with the people. Uniforms no longer have any meaning. No other authority exists except revolutionary order, and the latter requires that these guns stay in the hands of the workers.’[3]

Durruti’s sincere speech convinced the Assault Guard captain who left with his men, taking with them a few unusable weapons, thus saving face and avoiding a confrontation. In fact, another anarcho-syndicalist activist, Garcia Oliver, turned up at Escofet’s office to demand the return of these weapons. He left with four or five pistols from Escofet’s drawer.

The CNT Defense Committee in Barcelona was based in the working class district of Pueblo Nuevo. Two trucks had been modified for use as mobile headquarters, one of which was manned by the anarchists of the Nosotros affinity group, including Durruti, Ascaso, García Oliver, Gregorio Jover and Aurelio Fernández. When the CNT Defense Committee received information that the infantry regiment stationed in the Pedralbes barracks and the Montesa cavalry baracks were being mobilized, the two CNT–FAI trucks set off for their pre-arranged locations. “Workers’ patrols posted along the way realized that the hour of the revolution had come.”[4] Shortly afterwards the sirens from the factories and ships in the harbor began to sound, the pre-arranged signal to the Barcelona Defense Committee to call its supporters to arms. The other mobile command post was stationed in the construction union, then based in the Casa Cambo which, within 24 hours was to become the “Casa CNT–FAI”.

Throughout the evening of 18 July and the early hours of 19 July, the workers busied themselves making their final preparations. When the military finally left the Pedralbes barracks at 4.15am on the morning of 19 July to occupy strategic points in Barcelona, they were met on the streets by the people in arms. Whether they were caught up in the euphoria of the moment or, perhaps, aware of the overwhelming odds against them, first the Assault Guards and then the Guardia Civil threw in their lot with the people; then it was the turn of the soldiers on the streets to surrender their weapons.

The CNT–FAI had a number of affiliates in the Ataranzas barracks, particularly sergeants Gordo and Manzana who, early on 19^th July, attempted to rise against their officers. They were unable to gain control of the building, but they did manage to remove machine-guns, rifles and hand grenades which they handed over to the CNT Defense Committee. They also established a gun emplacement in the Plaza del Teatro which prevented the rebels in the Plaza de Cataluña from making contact with other isolated rebel forces.

The San Andrés barracks was the principle objective of the CNT Defense Committee, because of the arsenal that was to make the CNT the masters of Catalonia. The anarcho-syndicalist union had the support of the air force through Lieutenant Meana:

“I was terribly afraid of the consequences of what would happen if the arms in the San Andrés barracks fell into the hands of the militants – I ordered a company of the Guardia Nacional Republicana to occupy the Parque de Arillería to prevent the pillage of arms there,” said Escofet. Captain Francisco López Gatel was in charge — he returned shortly after with tears in his eyes and pleaded for Escofet’s forgiveness for not having been able to fulfill the mission — the barracks had been invaded and the Captain had been unable to open fire on the people. “But what a responsibility for me — and how great were to be the consequences.”

(Escofet, p. 331).

For Escofet, the situation in the city that night was truly alarming. The rebellion had been put down but the rebels had destroyed the forces of “public order”:

“Thousands of people of both sexes, who had not fought, were running through the city streets, armed and wearing combat helmets and other military clothing taken from the barracks or from the defeated soldiers; thousands of excited people, who refused to be overcome by exhaustion, did not stop celebrating — waving flags and raising the clenched fist. Civilians mingled with security guards, Assault Guards, even the CNT, unbuttoned or in shirt-sleeves, raising the clenched fist, the newly minted salute of the people in arms. In those moments I asked myself with anguish how I could put down this popular inundation — how could I prevent it from becoming worse? The rebellion had been defeated throughout Catalonia. The tragic consequences provoked by the criminal elements of the military rebels became clear. The priority of the CNT–FAI was to implement the social revolution — Utopian and unrealizable — instead of reinforcing regimented authority.

(Escofet, p. 348).

“With the rebellion over I felt it necessary to visit President Companys in the Palacio de la Generalidad. His face showed no sign of relief at the victory we had achieved in Barcelona and throughout Catalonia against the military rebellion, a triumph which should have consolidated the authority and prestige of the government of the Generalidad. On the contrary, his face expressed a profound gravity, showing mixed emotions – sadness and worry. Possibly he saw similar emotions reflected in my face, certainly those were the ones which I felt. ‘President’, I told him, ‘I come to communicate with you officially that the rebellion has been completely overcome. The last strongholds and redoubts have been taken. All the rebel chiefs and officers are prisoners. All that remains are one or two snipers.’

“‘Yes, Escofet, very well,’ the President replied. ‘But the situation is chaotic. The armed and uncontrollable mob are rampaging through the streets, committing every type of excess. And, on the other hand the CNT, powerfully armed, is master of the city and holder of power – what can we do?’

“‘President’, I added, ‘I undertook to dominate the military revolt in Barcelona, and I have done this. But an authority requires the means of coercion to make itself obeyed and these do not exist today. As a result, there is no authority. And I, my dear President, do not know how to perform miracles.’

(Escofet, p. 352).

“‘I have spoken with General Aranguren, commander of the GNR and also head of its IV Organic Divisions and with General Arando, head of the Assault and Security Guards and both are convinced, as am I, that in order to reestablish public order, we would have to embark on a battle as great as the one we have just completed, and this simply is not possible. How can we expect our Guardias, tired but euphoric due to victory, to confront the people with whom they have been fighting for those same ideals of liberty. If we were mad enough to try it we would never succeed. For the same reason, and for humanity, the forces of public order did not fire on those who invaded San Andres, in spite of the fact of the fact we knew we would lose all the arms. For the moment we are all overcome by the situation, including the leaders of the CNT. The only solution, President, is to contain the situation politically, without minimizing our respective authorities – that is, if we were able to contain the situation politically.’”

The CNT in Madrid had also, unsuccessfully, requested weapons, and had taken matters into its own hands. A Madrid Defense Committee was set up on 18 July that organized five-man patrols, each member armed with a pistol and a grenade. According to Juan Gómez Casas,[5] the first weapons were issued in Madrid on the night of 18–19 July on the initiative of “military figures exasperated with the stupidity of a government that believed itself still in control of the situation.” The first arms distributed among CNT and FAI workers in Madrid were those they took themselves after storming a truck.

As indicated earlier, the focal point of the rebellion in Catalonia was the Ataranzas barracks. The Metalworkers’ Union of the CNT insisted that its capture be their responsibility alone. They felt it a point of honor to avenge their comrades who had fallen in the Ramblas and in the streets adjacent to the barracks. Throughout the night of the 19/20^th July the libertarians fought, advancing cautiously, establishing barricades and setting up advance positions that would permit an attack on the Ataranzas barracks. Tejedor, secretary of the Metalworkers’ Union, gave the following account of the attack:

“The glorious feat of the Ataranzas capture was the exclusive achievement of the men of the CNT. The Guardia Civil wanted to take part in the attack but we would not permit this. It was a matter of honor … On 20 July comrade Durruti shouted to everyone – ‘Forward the men of the CNT!’ So began the epic attack which overshadowed the capture of the Bastille by the people of Paris.”

The capture of the Ataranzas fortress was not a major military target, the rebellion had been defeated but it was a psychological success for the anarcho-syndicalists. The weapons taken from the armory and the ammunition stores provided the workers with much needed war materiel while the capture of General Manuel Goded, leader of the rising in Catalonia and the Balearics, was a major propaganda victory which seriously undermined nationalist and bourgeois morale. The Confederal Defense Committee of Catalonia, which had been responsible for the defeat of the nationalist rising in Barcelona, refused to accept Goded’s surrender. Instead they chose to press on with the fight until all the rebels had been wiped out or surrendered. The terms of Goded’s surrender, accepted by Companys, were broadcast from the Generalidad Palace. Goded’s surrender, in fact, referred only to himself; he did not order the surrender of the troops under his command: “I must declare to the Spanish people that luck has not been with me. From this moment on, any who seek to continue fighting should no longer count on me.” The Confederal Defense Committee’s decision to fight on after the defeat of Goded was to invest the resistance with a revolutionary depth and to break the myth that the working-class would always be beaten by the army. Had the activists of the CNT–FAI laid down their weapons following Goded’s surrender and returned home, as the bourgeois politicians no doubt hoped, there would have been no social revolution and the unions would have been reduced to mere auxiliaries of the forces of public order. Instead, 36 hours after the military rising started onmainland Spain, bourgeois power had collapsed and the workers, the majority of whom belonged to the anarcho-syndicalist CNT, controlled the streets of the capital and had become the de bacto power in Barcelona.

Overnight, power had shifted from the smoke-filled committee rooms of the Generalidad Palace to the union Locals of Barcelona. The CNT controlled arms, transport and communications. The President of the Generalidad, Lluis Companys, a remarkably astute Machiavellian politician, recognized this and immediately began maneuvering to salvage what he could from the situation and suffocate the looming social revolution before it had time to draw breath and displace the order and power structure for ever. Confident of his ability to win the collaboration of the anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist “leadership”, Companys invited CNT–FAI representatives to his office where leaders of the other bourgeois and Marxist Catalan parties had already been assembled in an adjoining room.

García Oliver and Buenaventura Durruti responded to Companys’ call on behalf of the CNT on 20 July. They came directly from the barricades as victors of the day “armed to the teeth … shabby and soiled by dust and smoke” to listen to the wily Companys’ honeyed speech. García Oliver has given the following account of what Companys had to say:

“Before I begin, I must say that the CNT and FAI have not received the treatment which they merit by virtue of their true importance – I have found myself obliged to confront and persecute you. You are now masters of the city and Catalonia, for you alone have defeated the fascist soldiery – the fact is that today, you, who were subject to harassment up until yesterday, have seen off the fascists and the military. Knowing, then, who and what you are, I can but address you in tones of utmost sincerity. You have won and everything lies at your feet; if you have any need of me, or no longer want me as president of Catalonia, just say the word now and I shall become just another foot soldier in the struggle against fascism. I, along with the men of my party, my name and my prestige, may be of use in the struggle which has ended so felicitously in this city today – you may rely upon me and my loyalty as a man and a politician convinced that today has seen the demise of a whole dishonorable past, as a man who honestly wishes to see Catalonia march in the van of the most socially progressive countries.”[6]

The president went on to suggest that under his chairmanship the CNT–FAI, together with all the antifascist parties, should set up “an organ capable of pursuing the revolutionary struggle until victory is assured”. This ad hoc ruling body was to be known as the Central Committee of Antifascist Militias (CCMA). After preliminary discussions with the assembled bourgeois and Marxist politicians, García Oliver informed them that their suggestion for the Antifascist Militias’ Committee was a matter for the Regional Committee of the CNT to decide and that they would be informed as soon as that body had decided on the matter. Companys’ artful flattery and skillful maneuvering had its desired effect.[7] The anarchist militants who had gone into the meeting as victors emerged as the vanquished.

García Oliver and Durruti gave their respective accounts of Companys’s proposal to the Regional Committee of the CNT. Uncertain as to the ambiguous role of that organization now that the military and the bourgeoisie had been routed and power had passed into the hands of the working classes, the members of the Regional Committee were anxiously pondering CNT strategy now that the revolutionary initiative had passed to the working class. The ambiguous role of the unions in the revolution had been debated at great length at the Zaragoza Congress earlier that year. Federico Urales, the father of the anarchist Federica Montseny, had argued, convincingly, that the great unions and the mammoth industrial federations would cease to exist “by reason of the sustained decentralization of the federal compact of solidarity”. Implicit in his argument was that revolution spelled death for the old system — including the CNT and FAI as organizations. Urales’ argument was not made explicitly but it could be deduced from the producer-consumer relationship in which the producer had both a sphere of economic activity in the workplace and as an administrative-political consumer within the municipality. The assembly being sovereign in work as well as in the municipality, there could be no room for anything separate from and outside these two aspects of daily life.

The Regional Committee, whose General Secretary at the time was Mariano R. Vázquez, opted, however, to deal with the question of power on Companys’ terms rather than accept the fact that the popular organs of the social revolution which were being thrown up by the people in arms had made it redundant. The erstwhile defense committees of the CNT and FAI, representing 60 per cent of Barcelona’s working class, had, with the collapse of bourgeois power, superseded their organizational identity and become the popular revolutionary committees of each barrio or village, natural organisms of the revolution itself. On the other hand, by choosing political collaboration, the Regional Committee of the CNT began to transform itself from being an instrument of its membership into a self-serving institution concerned only with its own survival; its legitimate authority, derived from its long tradition of direct democracy and accountability, was to become coercive power.

Companys was contacted by telephone and informed of the Regional Committee’s acceptance, in principle, of the setting up of an Antifascist Militias’ Committee of Catalonia, pending the agreement of all the other parties – and, of course, the decision of a Plenum of local CNT unions which would be convened as soon as possible. In the meantime, Durruti, García Oliver and Aurelio Fernández were empowered by the Regional Committee to continue negotiations to ensure that should the Plenums agree to the setting up of the Antifascist Militias’ Committee it would come into operation promptly and smoothly.

Apart from flying in the face of anarchist principles, it should be stressed that the decision of the Regional Committee to continue negotiations with the politicians and the remnants of the State apparatus was directly contrary to normal CNT practice — which was to have no dealings whatsoever with political parties or representatives of the state until the Organization itself had pronounced on the matter. It was a decision that reflected a long-standing weakness within the CNT.

Because there was no paid trade union apparatus it was believed that neither bureaucracy nor “leaderism” existed within the organization. But this was not quite the case. The deference of the rank and file to the “natural” leaders who had won the workers’ trust by their personal sacrifice and commitment to the “idea” led inexorably to oligarchy. Bakunin was very conscious of these dangers and made the point clearly in God and the State — “There should be no fixed and constant authority, but mutual and voluntary authority. Society should not indulge men of genius, nor should it accord then special rights or privileges because: it would often mistake a charlatan for a man of genius; because through such systems of privileges it might even transform a genius into a charlatan; it would establish a master over itself.”

The representatives of the Regional Committee returned to the Generalidad Palace that same evening to begin provisional discussions with the Catalan politicians — José Terradellas, Artemio Aiguadé and Jaime Miravitlles of the Esquerra Republicana de Cataluña; Pey Poch of Catalan Action; Juan Comorera of the Socialist Union of Catalonia; Rafael Vidiella of the UGT and PSOE; and Julián Gorkín of the POUM. The Estat Catalá was disbarred from participating in the Militias’ Committee on the grounds that its leader, Dencás, was a fascist who had fled to Italy.

The following day, 21 July, the Regional Committee of the CNT hastily summoned an Extraordinary Assembly of Regional Plenums. According to José Peirats[8] this was not, in fact, a properly constituted Plenum of Unions with an agenda to be discussed in a regular way by the union representatives; it was, rather, a gathering of militants at Regional Committee level who — present in a personal capacity — had no mandate or authority to decide on the issues under discussion. More than a month was to pass before a regular Plenum of the Catalan CNT unions was to be held.

Mariano R. Vázquez, as Secretary of the National Committee of the CNT, gave the following account of the Extraordinary and pivotal assembly in his report to the International Working Men’s Association (AIT) in December 1937:

“On 21 July, 1936, Barcelona was the venue for a Regional Plenum of the Local Federations and Sub-Regionals called by the Regional Committee of Catalonia. The situation was analyzed and it was unanimously decided not to mention Libertarian Communism until such time as we had captured that part of Spain that was in the hands of the rebels. Consequently, the Plenum resolved not to press on with totalitarian achievements, for we were facing a problem: imposing a dictatorship — wiping out all the guards and activists from the political parties who had played their part in the victory over the rebels on 19 and 20 July; a dictatorship which, in any event would be crushed from without even if it succeeded from within. The Plenum, with the exception of the Regional Federation of Bajo Llobregat, opted for collaboration with the other political parties and organizations in setting up the Antifascist Militias’ Committee (AMC). On the decision of this Plenum the CNT and the FAI sent their representatives to it.”

The Catalan middle classes were horrified by the social revolution which was gathering momentum before their eyes. Their world was being turned upside down and they shrilly denounced the anarcho-syndicalists as responsible for the excesses and outrages which occurred in the wake of the workers’ resistance to the military uprising. The people in arms had begun to settle old scores, directing their fury against the more notorious torturers, gunmen and professional informers of the Republic and the Dictatorship. Ramón Sales in Barcelona and Inocencio Feced in Alicante were examples of men who had been involved in the murders of thousands of workers under the terrorist regime of Generals Anido and Arlegui and who had been summarily executed. There were also numerous cases of outrages and the settling of old scores by “revolutionists of the last moment” as a means of establishing their credibility as militants.

It was the sensitive question of “law and order” which provided the bourgeoisie with their first leverage point against the CNT. The CNT and FAI leaderships in Catalonia had shown themselves eager to establish their credentials as honorable and responsible members of the “revolutionary” government, the Central Committee of Antifascist Militias. Following a sustained disinformation campaign of exaggerated allegations, half truths and downright lies made by a near hysterical bourgeoisie, offended and threatened by the close attention paid to their class by the union organized patrols and search parties, the Regional Committee and the Local Federation of CNT Unions of Barcelona rose to the bait and broadcast a warning on Radio Barcelona on 25 July, day five of the social revolution, that the CNT and FAI, as “the authentic representatives of the antifascist proletariat” had “resolved upon very severe measures” which would be “enforced without a second thought” against any person or persons caught looting.

Solidaridad Obrera, the Catalan CNT daily newspaper, had, on the other hand, a more considered perspective on the alleged breakdown of “law and order”:

“For a period of two days, Barcelona was reduced to two armies, each struggling to vanquish the other, and there is nothing like the stench of gunpowder to unleash all the instincts which man carries in his soul. Then again, the convulsions reached a point where control was lost over those folk whose sole concern is to satisfy their selfish whims and vengeful instincts. To these and to these alone do we owe it that this week (and not as many as reputed) have been perpetrated in Barcelona that which the CNT and, with it, all of the organizations which have participated in the revolution, would have preferred not to see perpetrated. Nonetheless, we cannot join in the chorus of those who, when all is said and done, carry the responsibility, not merely for the fascist revolt but also for having kept the people for years and years on end in a condition of permanent destitution and an even more lingering ignorance. Since these eternal grumblers fail to do so, we are under an obligation to point out that the looting has not been the whole story. Countless valuables discovered during searches and in burned buildings have not woun$ up in anyone’s private possession. The organization of the CNT and the Antifascist Militias’ Committee have in safekeeping precious metals and objets d’art to the value of four million lesetas. The daily newspapers have carried reports on countless instances of the surrender of such items by workers who might not have had a crumb to eat within the week — who can tell?”

Honoring the libertarians, Escofet said:

“I should recognize their honesty and the romanticism of many of them who went out of their way to hand in true treasures in bank notes, valua”le jewels which had fallen into their hands. Some tried to purify themselves by burning bank notes. I had to fill several safes with the goods handed in.

“In contrast, the crimes committed in Catalonia and throughout the Republican zone were generally inevitable excesses, ones one could expect after a great revolutionary convulsion. They were disorders of a passing and ephemeral type, not part of a system based in the force or the lack of humanity.’ (Escofet, p. 350).

The ploy of alleged excesses being perpetrated against their new-found partners in the struggle against fascism was successful. Not only were a number of so-called “uncontrollable” militants executed for “outrages” committed in the first weeks of the revolution, the authority of the “higher” committees grew increasingly more powerful. It was an authority which increasingly began to be directed against militants of their own organization whenever they challenged that authority by overstepping certain prescribed limits which, it was felt, might upset the new found harmony in the common struggle against fascism.

The declarations and pronouncements which emanated from the various committees of the CNT and FAI at this time all ignored any reference to the social revolution which was by that time in full swing. Nor did they provide any guidelines. They simply limited themselves to calling off the general strike declared on 19 July ordering a return to work and at the same time exhorting their members to press on for a military victory against fascism.

The obvious unwillingness of the CNT and FAI leadership to press home their revolutionary advantage was not lost on Companys or the central government of José Giral. In the face of a massive squatting campaign in properties abandoned by the pro-Francoist bourgeoisie, the Catalan government announced a 25 per cent cut in rents while the Madrid government fixed the cut at 50 per cent. Instead of challenging this move by championing the socialization of bourgeois property, by then a fait accompli, the CNT daily, Solidaridad Obrera, plumped for the 50 per cent rent.

García Oliver’s principled opposition to collaboration with the bourgeois parties did not lead him to refuse the nomination which endorsed his membership of the Militias’ committee along with Marcos Alcón, Durruti’s replacement, José Asens, Aurelio Fernández and Diego Abad de Santillan. In a commemorative article on the Militias’ Committee the following year García Oliver wrote of “the most extraordinary Plenum of Locals and Comarcals” which, summoned in haste with delegates ignorant as to the nature of the Plenum, had succeeded in overturning the fundamental principles of the CNT:

“The CNT and the FAI opted for collaboration and democracy, eschewing the revolutionary totalitarianism which simply had to have led to the revolution’s being strangled by the confederal and anarchist dictatorship. They trusted in the word and in the person of a Catalan democrat and retained and supported Companys in the office of President of the Generalidad; they accepted the Militias’ Committee and worked out a system of representation proportionate with numbers which, although not fair in that the UGT and the Socialist Party, minority groups in Catalonia, were assigned an equal number of positions with the triumphant CNT and anarchists — implied sacrifice calculated to lure dictatorially inclined parties along the path of loyal collaboration which might not be jeopardized by suicidal competition.”[9]

In mitigation, it should be said that the overwhelming acceptance of the fateful Santillan proposition by the Extraordinary Plenum of 21 July was not due so much to uncertain commitment to Libertarian Communism as to a conviction that a declaration of Libertarian Communism would provoke immediate international retaliation. British warships were anchored in the vicinity and, it was widely thought, preparing to land troops and occupy the city to protect British interests there. By collaborating with the bourgeois Antifascist Militias’ Committee the CNT delegates thought they could deceive the foreign powers and the Madrid government into believing that the bourgeois democratic order still held in Catalonia while, in fact, the CNT-FAI wielded real economic, political and military power. The only people deceived were themselves.

García Oliver claims that in spite of the overwhelming vote against the social revolution taken by the delegates at the Plenum, he still refused to accept the decision and called a meeting of the Nosotros group that same evening to propose a coup. He suggested that under Durruti’s leadership anarchist columns should seize the main centers of government, the Generalidad and the City chambers, the Telephone Exchange and the Plaza de Cataluña, and the Ministry of the Interior and Security Directorate. Durruti, who, much to García Oliver’s chagrin, had been noticeably silent during the debate, did not rise to the bait:

“García Oliver’s argument, here and during the Plenum, strikes me as splendid. His plan to carry out a coup is perfect. But this does not seem to me to be the opportune moment. My feeling is that it should be put off until after the capture of Zaragoza, which cannot take more than 10 days. I insist that we shelve these plans until Zaragoza has been taken. At present, with only Catalonia as a base, we would be reduced to the most minimal geographical area.” [10]

The Central Committee of the Antifascist Militias Committee met for the first time that same night, 21 July, in the Maritime Museum where it established its permanent headquarters. Its representation consisted of the following: CNT — 3; UGT — 3; Esquerra Republicana (Companys’ party) — 3; FAI — 1; Catalan Action — 1; POUM — 1; PSOE (Socialist Party) — 1; Unión de Rabassaires (Catalan peasants’ party) — 1. The Generalidad was represented by a Commissioner with a military adviser. Durruti attended this first meeting as a CNT delegate, but it was to be his first and last. He felt only too keenly the contradictions and tensions that existed between the rule of the Central Committee of Militias and the popular organs of the social revolution.

In Madrid, the military rebellion led by General Fanjul was also quickly put down by the armed working class. The anarchists were numerically less strong in the capital, always a stronghold of the socialist UGT union, one of the reasons why arms had been distributed at the last moment, but they did play an important role in crushing the rebellion and halting the advance of General Mola’s Army of the North. David Antona, acting secretary of the National Committee of the CNT in Madrid, had issued an ultimatum to Premier Giral that either he release the CNT militants held in the Republic’s jails within three hours or “the CNT will see to their liberation itself.” The threat had the desired effect and the anarchist prisoners were released. Antona gave the following moving account of events in Castile:

“… Every one of the barracks in Madrid has risen up in arms. It is the same story in Toledo, Guadalajara and Alcalá de Henares. Around Madrid the fascists have succeeded in throwing up a cordon of gun-metal. No longer now only a question of the Montaña barracks which at the moment (11 a.m. on 20 July) was being bombed by loyalist aircraft … the bombardment continues. Madrid resembles hell. The courage of her sons in those hours of drama deserves to be writ in letters of gold … One might say that the whole of Madrid was mobilized. In proportion as the gravity of the situation becomes known, so the revolutionary ardor of the people grows … No authority, one thinks, will be able to call this cyclone to heel. Those who have unleashed it will have to eat the dust of defeat. The telephone goes again. I pick up the receiver and a comrade shrieks at me that the Montaña barracks has fallen. Contemptuous of death some Assault Guards and Young Socialists, with men of the CNT at their head, burst into the barracks, razing the premises. This was the people’s power making ready to mete out justice … the only creative justice. At that solemn hour (12 noon, July 20) an entire regime perished at the hands of the people. The bullets which ended the lives of army officers and commanders from the Montana barracks killed, not men, but an entire society…

“In the wake of the fall of the Montaña barracks the remaining rebel strongholds in Madrid were falling one after another. With exemplary heroism the Madrid populace was committing itself with bared breast to the assault on the barracks, prompted by the boundless zeal which makes the great feats of history possible. Mola’s advance on Madrid was halted in the Sierra. Peasants, unarmed except for a few hunting pieces and with a handful of CNT people and some from the UGT who had set out from Madrid with a few dozen hand grenades, contained an entire army. The next day, once the revolt in Madrid had been brought under control, reinforcements were dispatched to the Sierra del Guadarrama where, as mentioned earlier, the troops of the bloodthirsty ex-General Mola had been brought to a standstill.” [11]

The people in arms had broken the military encirclement of the capital.

One of the first actions of the newly established Central Committee of Antifascist Militias in Barcelona was to set about organizing and co-ordinating columns out of the workers’ militias and armed groups which had developed on the initiative of the Defense Committees of the CNT. It was decided that the first of these columns, led by Durruti, should be sent to relieve Zaragoza, which had fallen to the military under the command of General Cabanellas. Zaragoza was an important objective, both strategically and for reasons of solidarity. It guarded the Ebro valley, dominated the entire region, was an important communications center, and was the main obstacle to the union of the Asturias and Catalonia with the Basque country, the most important industrial region of Spain. Zaragoza also had an important arsenal containing some 40,000 guns and, last but not least from the point of view of the CNT, it was an important anarchist strojghold where thousands of libertarians had fallen into the hands of the military.

Why had such a strong anarchist center fallen so easily into the hands of the military, almost without a shot being fired? Certainly, the rising had been well organized with virtually every repressive agency of the state throwing in its lot with the insurgents. This had not been the case in Barcelona and Madrid where substantial numbers of Assault Guards and Guardia Civil had remained loyal to the Republic. The task of the military had been made easier by the government decree of July 14, which ordered the closure of all CNT Locals. This had seriously limited the capacity of the anarcho-syndicalist to organize resistance, but the real reason lay elsewhere. For some time the reformist CNT leadership in Zaragoza had been cooperating closely with the local Popular Front administration in encouraging economic recovery and collaborating with local businessmen on plans to reduce unemployment. Pronouncing in favor of voting during the February elections they had been effectively co-opted into the system. At a meeting called by the Zaragoza CNT on the eve of the rebellion, militants had been swayed by the arguments of pacifist Miguel Abós that they should not respond hastily to the military threat but should instead pursue a pacific and restrained strategy of nonviolence. They had, they believed, a good working relationship with the authorities in the city and, with a membership of 30,000, thought they had little to fear. CNT militants such as Miguel Chueca and metalworker Francisco Garaita tried to mobilize resistance, but so well organized and determined were the military and their allies that by 19 July it was too late to mobilize even a fraction of the membership. The general strike called by the CNT on 19 July was, in Zaragoza, essentially a defensive rather than an offensive weapon and in the face of massive and brutal repression the strike began to weaken after a heroic two weeks of passive resistance. The only hope the workers had now lay with the militia columns from Barcelona.[12]

Diego Abad de Santillán was the anarchist representative on the Central Committee of Antifascist Militias Committees with the task of organizing the militia columns along libertarian lines. To prevent the creation of a army dependent on a centralized general staff, the militia columns were controlled by the unions and district defense committees who were responsible for recruiting and organizing their own columns. The unions also took on responsibility for the families of the volunteers who went to the front. An artillery Colonel recently escaped from Pamplona commented dryly: “From the military point of view there was frightening chaos, but the important thing was that the chaos was working.” George Orwell’s observations, although made the following year, capture the spirit of the militias:

“The essential point of the system was the social equality between officers and men. Everyone from general to private drew the same pay, ate the same food, wore the same clothes, and mingled on terms of complete equality. If you wanted to slap the general commanding the division on the back and ask him for a cigarette, you could do so, and no one thought it curious. In theory at any rate each militia was a democracy and not a hierarchy. It was understood that orders had to be obeyed, but it was also understood that when you gave an order you gave it as a comrade to a comrade and not as a superior to inferior. There were officers and NCOs, but there was no military heel-clicking and saluting. They had attempted to produce within the militias a sort of temporary working model of the classless society. Of course, there was no perfect equality but there was a nearer approach to it than I had ever seen or than I would have thought conceivable in time of war.” [13]

The mobilization for the attack on Zaragoza was rapid. Four days after the rebels had ben defeated in Barcelona the first militia columns began to leave the Catalan capital to liberate their comrades in Zaragoza. These working class shock troops, numbering around 3,000, had been recruited mainly from the ranks of the CNT and the FAI and were led by Buenaventura Durruti and Pérez Farras, the column’s military adviser. Other anarcho-syndicalist columns and armed groups such as that raised by Saturnino Carod and the Ortíz column also were hastily organized to force the rebels back and relieve the Aragonese capital.

The organizational structure of the militia units was a principal point of discussion among the volunteers. There could be no question of restoring the authoritarian militarist principles of command and obey. Slowly, through discussion and the experiences of trial and error that, little by little, the structure of the libertarian militias evolved as they marched towards Aragón.

In the beginning, the organizational structure was reasonably simple, evolving to meet the requirements of each new situation as they presented themselves.

“Ten men formed a group with a delegate freely chosen to head it. Ten of these groups formed a century and the man in charge was chosen in the same way. Five centuries formed an assembly, which also had a delegate. The delegates of the centuries, and the delegate of the assembly formed the committee of the assembly. The delegates of the assembly with the general delegate of the column formed the war committee of the column.”[14]

Durruti’s military adviser, Pérez Farrás, Companys’ man on the Central Committee of Antifascist militias, a professional soldier, was concerned to restore the authority of the Generalidad over the popular force and remonstrated with Durruti over the application of libertarian principles to military organization. Durruti replied:

“I have already said and I repeat; during all my life I have acted as an anarchist. The fact of having been given political responsibility for a human collective cannot change my convictions. It is under these conditions that I agreed to play the role given to me by the Central Committee of the Militias.

“I thought — and what has happened confirms my belief — that a working man’s militia cannot be led according to the same rules as an army. I think that discipline, co-ordination and the fulfillment of a plan are indispensable. But this idea can no longer be understood in the terms of the world we have just destroyed. We have new ideas. We think that solidarity among men must awaken personal responsibility which knows how to accept discipline as an autonomous act.

“Necessity imposes a war on us, a struggle which differs from many of those which we have carried on before. But the goal of our struggle is always the triumph of the revolution. This means not only victory over the enemy, but also a radical change in man. For this change to occur man must learn to live in freedom and develop in himself his potentialities as a responsible individual. The worker in the factory, using his tools and directing production, is bringing about a change in himself. The fighter, like the worker, uses his gun as a tool and his acts must lead to the same goals as those of the worker.

“In the struggle he cannot act like a soldier under orders but like a man who is conscious of what he is doing. I know it is not easy to get such a result, but what one cannot get by reason, one can never get through force. If our revolutionary army must be maintained through fear, we will have changed nothing but the color of fear. It is only by freeing itself from fear that a free society can be built.”[15]

On 23 July, US Secretary of State, Cordell Hull notified President Roosevelt that “one of the most serious factors in this situation lies in the fact that the Spanish government has distributed large quantities of arms and ammunition into the hands of irresponsible members of left wing political organizations.”[16]

Before leaving Zaragoza on 24 July, one of these “irresponsible” left-wingers, Buenaventura Durruti gave a memorable interview to Canadian journalist Pierre Van Paasen of the Toronto Daily Star. The interview sums up concisely and with feeling the aspirations of the social revolution and the ponderous obstacles which stood in its way. Van Paasen asked Durruti why he had made what was to him the curious statement that they were determined “to finish with fascism once and for all, in spite of the government”? Durruti replied:

“No government in the world fights fascism to the death. When the bourgeoisie sees power slipping from its grasp, it has recourse to fascism to maintain itself. The Liberal government of Spain could have rendered fascist elements powerless long ago. Instead it temporized and compromised and dallied. Even now, there are men in this government who want to go easy with the rebels. You can never tell, you know, he laughed, the present government might yet need these rebellious forces to crush the workers’ movement.”

Van Paasen then interjected that both Largo Caballero and Indalecio Prieto had stated that the Popular Front’s only concern was to save the Republic and restore Republican order:

“That may be the views of those señores”, said Durruti, “We syndicalists, we are fighting for the revolution. We know what we want. To us it means nothing that there is a Soviet Union somewhere in this world, for the sake of whose peace and tranquility the workers of Germany and China were sacrificed to fascist barbarism by Stalin. We want the revolution here in Spain, right now, not maybe after the next European war. We are giving Hitler and Mussolini far more to worry about today with out revolution than the whole Russian Red Army. We are setting an example to the German and Italian working class how to deal with fascism.

“Do you expect any help from France or Britain now that Hitler and Mussolini have begun to help the rebels?”, continued Van Paasen. “I do not expect any help for a libertarian revolution from any government in the world.” Durruti replied grimly. “Maybe the conflicting interests of the different imperialisms might have some influence on our struggle. That is quite possible. Franco is doing his best to drag Europe into the quarrel. He will not hesitate to pitch Germany against us. But we expect no help, not even from our own government in the final analysis.”

Van Paasen then challenged him: “Can you win alone?” Durruti considered the question carefully. The journalist added: “You will be sitting on top of a pile of ruins even if you are victorious.” The anarchist replied quietly in a hoarse whisper: “We have always lived in slums and holes in the wall. We will know how to accommodate ourselves for a time. For you must not forget that we can also build. It is we who built these palaces and cities, here in Spain and in America and elsewhere. We are not in the least afraid of ruins. We are going to inherit the earth. There is not the slightest doubt about that. The bourgeoisie might blast and ruin its own world before it leaves the stage of history. We carry a new world, here, in our hearts.” He added: “That world is growing in this minute.” [17]

Having secured Lerida, the Durruti column advanced quickly, virtually unopposed, towards Zaragoza urging the peasants in the villages they passed through to seize and collectivize the land on which they worked. On the morning of 27 July, as the column was leaving the town of Bujaraloz, three rebel airplanes suddenly attacked, exposing the workers to their first major baptism of fire. The devastating blitzkrieg killed 20 men and injured many more. The men panicked. Many threw down their weapons and scattered to the four winds to escape the noise and horror of the death and destruction which rained down on them from the skies, killing and mutilating at random. When the planes had disappeared the column slowly straggled back to Bujaraloz where Durruti assembled his men in the main square to deliver what eye witnesses have described as, perhaps one of the most important speeches in his long career as an activist:

“Friends. No one was forced to come here. You chose your fate, and the fate of the first column of the CNT and the FAI is a harsh one. García Oliver said on the radio at Barcelona that we were going to Aragón to conquer Zaragoza or to lose our lives in the attempt. I repeat the same thing. Rather than retreating, we must die. Zaragoza is in the hands of the fascists. Why did we leave Barcelona if it wasn’t to help them free themselves? They are waiting for us as we start to run. That is the way you show the world and our comrades the spirit of the anarchists, by succumbing to fear when faced by three planes.

“The bourgeoisie will not allow us to create Libertarian Communism because we want it. The bourgeoisie will resist because it defends its privileges and interests. The only way to create Libertarian Communism is to destroy the bourgeoisie. Only then will the road to our ideal world be assured. We have left behind us the peasants who have started to put into practice our ideal. They did this, feeling confident that our guns would guarantee their crops. So if we leave the road open to the enemy, it will mean that the initiatives of these peasants are useless, and what is worse, the conquerors will make them pay for their daring by assassinating them. This is the meaning of the struggle, a thankless one which resembles none that we have undertaken before. What happened today is a simple warning. Now the struggle is really going to start. They will shoot at us with cannons. They will strafe us with tons of grapeshot and sometimes we will have to fight with grenades, and even with knives. As the enemy feels it is cornered, it will respond like a beast and will bite fiercely. But it isn’t yet at bay and it is fighting to avoid this. It is leaning on the aid of Italy and Germany. If we allow these powers to become deeply involved in our war, it will be difficult to beat the fascists because they will have armaments superior to ours.

‘Our victory depends on the speed with which we act. The faster we attack, the greater chance we have of winning. Up to now victory is on our side. For that reason we must conquer Zaragoza at once. Tomorrow there will be no opportunities equal to those of today. In the ranks of the CNT there are no cowards and the men of the FAI die, but do not yield. We don’t want people among us who are afraid of the first attack. I ask those who ran, hindering the advance of the column, to have the courage to drop their weapons so that firmer hands can pick them up. The rest of us will continue our march. We will arrive in the north. We will join hands with our Asturian comrades and we will conquer and give Spain a better world. I ask those who go back to keep silent about what happened today because it fills me with shame’[18]

It was a bitter but invaluable lesson that helped turn a raw body of inexperienced men into an army of fearless warriors.

But the march on Zaragoza was halted. The officer who had been in charge of the garrison at Barbastro, Colonel Villalba (who was in all likelihood a frustrated conspirator) and Companys’ military adviser, Pérez Farrás, put pressure on Durruti not to advance further until his flanks had been sebured. There was also a problem of a shortage of weapons and ammunition. The Central Committee of Antifascist Militias in Barcelona had decided, in its wisdom, that the saving of Majorca was of greater strategic importance than the capture of Zaragoza. It refused to provision the column with the necessary weapons and ammunition required to advance the 35 kilometers to the Aragón capital. Durruti had also, no doubt, been influenced in his decision to hold his advance by the effect the air attack had had on his men.

The fateful halt lasted nine days. During that crucial time the initiative passed to the insurgents. The unexpected breathing space enabled the military and their rightist supporters time to break the general strike by imprisoning and slaughtering the leading working class militants. The militarization of the railways, during which it is estimated that 60 CNT railway workers were executed, enabled the rebels to rush reinforcements from Pamplona and successfully resist the attacks of the anarchist militia columns at Huesca and Almudévar. (See Background Briefs — ′Why did we fail to take Zaragoza?′)

Durruti went immediately to Barcelona to press the case for the attack on Zaragoza and to stress his urgent need for war material with his erstwhile comrade of the Nosotros anarchist affinity group, García Oliver, now a CNT representative on the Central Committee of Antifascist Militias and head of the War Department. Oliver, however, had shifted his position from opposition to the Central Committee and was now viewing events as a committed partisan of that institution. He told Durruti that the revolution had to be subordinated to the contingencies of the war against fascism. The attack on Majorca had priority over everything else. It would force an Italian intervention that, in turn, would lead to a direct British intervention to restore “the balance of power” in the Mediterranean. Nothing Durruti could say to the contrary had any effect on his old comrade who insisted that the war had priority above everything and having made their decision to collaborate with the liberal democratic and socialist parties of government they must stick by it.

Taking advantage of the stalemate, the Durruti Column deployed over a wide front and reorganized itself. The column was organized into teams of 25 militiamen which, in turn, made up centuries (four squads). These centuries banded together into detachments consisting of five centuries; each detachment boasted a surgical team and another machine-gun team. The column was backed up by artillery commanded by Captains Carceller, Cole and Batet. Later, quartermaster, health and transport sections were formed. The column also had an Advisory Military Council chaired by Pérez Farrás and made up of professional military men; this took charge of liaison and cartography. The column appointed a delegate general and consultation with the rank and file took place through century committees made up of the group delegates, detachment committees (the century delegates), and a War Committee of the Column that consisted of the detachment delegates together with the delegate-general and was advised by the Advisory Military Council. There was also a propaganda service under the supervision of Francisco Carreño that published El Frente the bulletin of the column and ran its radio station. The column also organized various special service units that operated clandestinely behind enemy lines. These units, such as “Sons of the Night”, and “The Black Gang”, were organized by Francisco Ponzán, an anarchist who was later to play a key role in the anarchist military intelligence and covert operations service of the Army of the East, the SIEP (Servicio de Investigación Especial Periférico). Ponzán later organized and co-ordinated the escape and evasion lines used by the ‘Réseau Pat O’Leary’and ′Comet′ networks during WWII.

The men of the Durruti Column began to concentrate their activities on assisting the collectives which they had helped set up during their advance. Many of the militiamen volunteered to be fighter-producers and went off to help with the harvest. Durruti himself gave the following account of the column’s activities to the Madrid-based paper CNT:

“As for my column, I am satisfied with it. We are making war and revolution simultaneously. Revolutionary measures are being taken, not just in Barcelona but right up to the firing line. Each village we take embarks upon a revolutionary course. A defeat of my column would be quite awful for our retreat would not be comparable to the retreat of any army: we should have to take with us all of the inhabitants of the villages through which we have passed — from the firing line right back to Barcelona. Along the route we have followed there are only fighters. Everyone works for the war and for the revolution: this is our strength. As for discipline, as I see it this is nothing more than honoring one’s own responsibility and that of others. I am against the barrack style discipline, but equally I am against the mistaken concept of freedom to which cowards habitually appeal in order to dodge the issue. In war, delegates should be obeyed: otherwise it is impossible to mount any operation. In my column, all of the dodges of the Great War have been tried — the mother on her death bed, the spouse going into labor, the ailing child, failing eyesight, etc. Anyone seeking to go home on the grounds that he is along as a volunteer and is volunteering to go home, I send home on foot — after he has had a piece of my mind. Things hardly ever get that far. To be frank, I am satisfied with the comrades who follow me.”[19]

The Workers’ Victory

A telegram from the National Committee of the CNT in Madrid to the National Committee delegate in Barcelona on 30 July summed up the military situation throughout the Peninsula:

“Received your telegram. We celebrate victory all Catalonia owing to unstoppable impetus our comrades. Zaragoza situation delicate. Make heroic efforts to bolster the struggle in this sector. Andalucia relatively alright. Small sectors of Galicia, Asturias, centers in Gijón and Oviedo. Spare no effort after your victory. Redouble them dispatching necessary assistance. Madrid fine. Comrades’ heroism excelling themselves. Castile’s meseta in rebel hands, being fought even now. Report — National Committee.”[20]

The impetus of the rightist revolt, which had, on the whole, been confined mainly to the army and most of the police, had been halted. The Spanish seamen had remained loyal because CNT and UGT activists had established Sailors’ Councils, overpowered their officers and sailed for the Bay of Tangiers where they were able to prevent rebel reinforcements arriving from Morocco. They would have been more successful had it not been for the intervention of the Royal Navy who prevented the Spanish seamen bombarding Algeciras where the rebel troops were being landed. However, the failure of the rebels to win over the navy was an unforeseen development which threw the first major spanner in the works as far as the insurgents were concerned. The air force also remained generally loyal.

The failure of the revolt to achieve a speedy victory left the generals isolated in different parts of Spain. General Mola’s Army of the North holding Galicia and Leon in the northwest, Navarre and a large part of Aragón in the north; Queipo de Llano in the south holding eastern Andalucia, and General Franco’s Army of Africa holding Morocco, the conspirators’ base and the islands. The military had the unlimited support of Italy and Portugal and the sympathy and tentative support of Hitler’s Germany. The German ambassador to Spain informed Berlin on 25 July that “unless something unforeseen occurs” the revolt could not succeed. Even a month later Hitler’s acting Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Hans Dieckhoff, noted dismally: “It is not to be expected that the Franco government can hold out for long, even after outward successes, without large scale support from outside.”

Less than two weeks after the rising, on August 1, French socialist premier Léon Blum and his foreign Secretary, Yvon Delbos, were to suggest that the main European powers sign a nonintervention pact. Britain accepted the proposal eagerly and without delay. It was believed that if there was no international intervention the Republican government could suppress the rebels on its own, thus avoiding an open clash developing between the Great Powers. After some delay caused by Portugal and Italy’s refusal to sign (both these countries were providing assistance to the Spanish rebels), these two countries together with Russia and Germany signed the six power Nonintervention Pact. The Axis powers had no intention of observing this agreement or permitting any moves to enforce it if such steps threatened to hamper the insurgents in any way, and only agreed to it knowing that it would do greater damage to the Republican cause than the rebels.

The Social Revolution

The military rising of 17 July ignited more than a heroic working class resistance; it fired joyous elemental hopes among Spanish workers and peasants, hope fueled by over 60 years of anarchist agitation and propaganda and unleashed a social revolution which threatened to sweep all before it, transforming what had hitherto been a utopian dream into reality. Spain was to show the world the way of free communism — of anarchy. The ideas formulated by the experiences of earlier generations of anarchist thinkers and militants in the various insurrectionary rehearsals for the free society which took place in Spain between 1931 and 1936.

Having gained control of the streets, the rescue of a treacherous bourgeois Republic from the clutches of rightist generals was the farthest thing in the mind of the Spanish people. From the first moment of the rising the initiative passed from a hesitant bourgeoisie not to the intellectuals[21] or party or union leaders, but to the rank and file of the organized working class, a substantial number of whom either belonged to the CNT or FAI or shared a belief in what those initials stood for — a free and just society.

A radical transformation of the social order had begun to take place throughout most of free Spain. Eyewitness Burnett Bollotten, a UPI correspondent in Madrid at the outbreak of the rising, prefaces his study of the first 18 months of the Civil War, The Grand Camouflage, thus:

‘Although the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July, 1936, was followed by a far-reaching social revolution in the anti-Franco camp — more profound in some respects than the Bolshevik Revolution in its early stages — millions of discerning people outside Spain were kept in ignorance, not only of its depth and range, but even of its existence, by virtue of a policy of duplicity and dissimulation of which there is no parallel in history …’

Within the anarchist movement there were three distinct points of view on the question of war and revolution. The first was that held by most people. In the early stages, the majority of rank and file militants believed that the war would be over in a matter of weeks. After all, a few days had been sufficient to rout the army in Barcelona and other industrial centers. They believed that the revolution and Libertarian Communism, as debated and adopted by the Zaragoza Congress of February that year, was an inseparable aspect of the struggle against economic and social oppression and proceeded immediately to socialize the factories, land and their communities.

The second position was that held by members of the regional and national committees of the CNT and the Peninsular Committee of the FAI, such as Federica Montseny, Diego Abad de Santillan, García Oliver, etc. who anticipated a lengthy war and opposed implementing Libertarian Communism until that war had been won. They opted instead for compromise and alliances with the bourgeois and Marxist parties. They argued that this strategy would prevent a situation developing wherein a victorious but exhausted CNT might be overwhelmed by another political force which has been more sparing with its might. It was a fatal strategy which soon absorbed them, undermined their principles and transformed what had hitherto been a great instrument of the working class into just another bureaucratic institution. They had ignored the experiences of the previous 12 years or so, which showed clearly that the bourgeois republicans and reformist socialists would seize every opportunity to persecute the libertarian revolutionaries without mercy. The socialists had unhesitatingly persecuted the libertarians under the Dictatorship when Caballero was Minister of Labor and the UGT a quasi-fascist labor front. There had also been the vicious suppression of Casas Viejas by the socialists and left republicans generally, and the anti-libertarian legislation.

Clearly, the collaborationists did not appreciate that to make common cause with one’s enemies can be fatal. They will continue to persecute you and may well even betray you to the enemy. Also, to insist that ordinary people are denied the transformation of their everyday lives that a revolution brings is the quickest way for them to lose interest in the struggle against fascism. Clearly, the collaborationists did not see this. To be realistic, this is not surprising. Their persecutors suddenly became their flatterers. The CNT had been an outlaw organization all its life and had even been forced into formal dissolution under the Dictatorship. Even its so-called class brothers in the UGT-PSOE had persecuted it. In a sense, then, the collaborationists cannot be blamed: they had been coerced into opportunism almost by the enormous pressures placed on them by their new-found allies. García Oliver had spent almost the entire period of the Dictatorship in prison, then emerged to a hero’s welcome, which he had no doubt earned. To be suddenly offered a ministry could turn anybody’s head.

The third body of opinion, unfortunately a minority one held by militants such as Durruti, Camillo Berneri, Jaime Balius, and, later, Santillan, also anticipated a lengthy war, but held that war and revolution were inseparable. Only a libertarian revolution could finally destroy fascism because to do so meant destroying the state, since fascism only means a certain mode of the state: all states turn fascist when the threat to the privilege that the state protects and to a degree also embodies becomes strong enough, which happens when the participatory procedures of the state can no longer secure that privilege. Fascism, in other words, in enforced class collaboration, as opposed to the voluntary class collaboration of parliamentary government.

The collectivizations, requisitions and impoundments of land and capitalist property was, therefore a fait accompli foisted upon the higher committees by popular assemblies of a triumphant rank and file. These higher committees were now primarily concerned with winning the military war, assuring public order, restoring normality in the field of production, and reassuring their bourgeois allies that they had nothing to fear from the anarchist movement. Already, the bureaucratic conservatism fostered by an utterly unique political situation, and one brought about by a life and death struggle at that, prompted the fateful decision to give priority to the war over social revolution. It led to an unbridgeable gap between the higher committees and the assemblies who were equally pressured into preoccupation with the very real practical tasks of reconstruction.

Collectivization

There were two types of expropriation of capitalist property, one partial, which could be described as nationalization, the preferred socialist solution; the other, total expropriation was the anarchist option. Incautación, the anarchist solution, meant workers’ self-management on the basis of the libertarian principles of mutual aid and solidarity. The socialists, through the UGT unions, opted for intervención, a system of partial control with workers’ delegates and management representatives participating jointly in the running of the factory. Other collectives were, in fact, run as co-operatives with workers, having taken over the factory or workshop, simply utilizing the existing money system and maintaining normal market relations among themselves, their suppliers and customers.

Often, however, the ultimate decision as to which type of administration — whether nationalized, cooperative, or socialized — had as much to do with economic and diplomatic factors as the political affiliation of the workforce. Factors militating against outright socialization, particularly in the larger industries, included the loss of home and foreign markets, a shortage of raw materials and foreign currency, the latter often contrived deliberately by the bourgeois central government in Madrid, and the all-important dependence of the major industries on foreign capital. José Peirats quotes the example of the Belgian consul in Barcelona who informed the CNT metalworkers’ union that 80 per cent of the Barrat foundry was controlled by Belgian shareholders. When the firm was expropriated orders evaporated. The Regional Committee of the CNT, anxious to avoid a diplomatic confrontation which might upset the prosecution of the war, leaned over backwards to accommodate the capitalist powers who, with the British and other foreign warships anchored offshore, were making thinly veiled threats of intervention if their interests were threatened.[22]

On 27 July, Mariano R. Vázquez, Regional Secretary of the CNT in Catalonia met the British consul in Barcelona, who presented Vázquez with a list of 87 companies in which Britain expressed an ‘interest’ and whose premises were to be protected against socialization. The following day the Regional Committee issued a statement, which indicated how far its members had developed into a deferential bureaucratic elite under the pressures of war and the dynamic of power:

‘From the outset, the Confederal Organization has given a wide berth to anything which might cause friction with foreign powers; at the helm in this situation, our line has been that the battle against fascism is primary, but that at all costs a situation of tension which might furnish other nations with an excuse to intervene in the fighting on Spanish soil to favor an international defense of capitalism had to be avoided. Yesterday this committee received a visit from a delegation from the British Consulate seeking some formula that might avert the perpetration by militians of acts that might prompt intervention from outside. A formula was agreed according to which we, for our part, would publish a list of British firms established in Barcelona and which are to be respected — Now all comrades are aware that these establishments have to be respected. This does not preclude the exercise of vigilance lest anyone seek to abuse the agreement and, under cover of that agreement to favor the conspiracy of enemy forces. Should such be the case, the responsibility will fall fully upon the British consulate. We have already expressed our willingness to respect foreign holdings.

— The Regional Committee.’

The Social Revolution

The achievements of anarchist communism in Spain between July 1936 and the end of 1937 undermine all the conventional perspectives of liberal and socialist thought. The facts, recorded by contemporary eye-witnesses, are documented in numerous works by Mintz, Dolgoff, Leval, Peirats, Bolloten, Souchy, Fraser and others. These accounts of the great experiment should not be studied as mere history, but, as Murray Bookchin points out, as ‘the raw material from which we can construct a realistic vision of a libertarian society.’ Among the best known of these descriptions and, according to eye witness Manuel Cruells, a Catalan journalist, the account which captured the mood and ‘political reality’ of Barcelona with ‘complete fidelity’ was that penned by George Orwell in Homage to Catalonia:

‘It was the first time I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Every shop and cafe had an inscription saying it had been collectivized; even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of address had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said ‘Señor′ or ‘Don′ or even ‘Usted′; everyone called everyone else ‘comrade’ and ‘thou’, and said ‘Salud!’ instead of ‘Buenos dias’. Tipping was forbidden by law; almost my first experience was receiving a lecture from a hotel manager for trying to tip a lift boy. There were no private motor cars, they had all been commandeered, and all the trams and taxis and much of the other transport were painted red and black.

‘The revolutionary posters were everywhere, flaming from the walls in clean reds and blues that made the few remaining advertisements look like daubs of mud. Down the Ramblas, the wide central artery of the town where crowds of people streamed constantly to and fro, the loudspeakers were bellowing revolutionary songs all day and far into the night. And it was the aspect of the crowds that was the queerest thing of all. In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist. Except for a small number of women and foreigners there were no ‘well-dressed’ people at all. Practically everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue overalls; or some variant of the militia uniform. All this was queer and moving; there was much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for. Also, I believed that things were as they appeared, that this was really a workers’ state and that the bourgeoisie had either fled, been killed, or voluntarily come over to the workers’ side; I did not realize that great numbers of well-to-do bourgeois were simply lying low and disguising themselves as proletarians for the time being.

‘Together with all this there was something of the evil atmosphere of war. The town had a gaunt untidy look, roads and buildings were in poor repair, the streets at night were dimly lit for fear of air raids, the shops were mostly shabby and half empty. Meat was scarce and milk practically unobtainable, there was a shortage of coal, sugar, and petrol, and a really serious shortage of bread. Even at this period the bread queues were often hundreds of yards long. Yet so far as one could judge the people were contented and hopeful. There was no unemployment, and the price of living was still extremely low; you saw very few conspicuously destitute people, and no beggars except the gypsies. Above all, there was a belief in the revolution and the future, a feeling of having suddenly emerged into an era of equality and freedom. Human beings were trying to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine. In the barbers’ shops were anarchist notices (the barbers were mostly anarchists) solemnly explaining that barbers were no longer slaves. In the streets were colored posters appealing to prostitutes to stop being prostitutes. To anyone from the hard-boiled, sneering civilization of the English-speaking races there was something pathetic in the literalness with which these idealistic Spaniards took the hackneyed phrases of revolution …’[23]

Imaginative experiments in collectivization were not confined to industry and agriculture; they took place in the public sector as well. In Barcelona an average of 3,000 sacks of flour were required each day for the 745 bakeries scattered throughout the city. The Bakers’ Section of the CNT decided to socialize all bakeries in the city, thereby rationalizing production and reducing unnecessary costs. The socialization of the health services was another great achievement of the revolution. In Catalonia, most of the health workers, including porters and doctors, were united in one union. The service was totally reorganized with the region being divided into nine administrative zones with 36 health centers coordinating health services in every village in the region. The centers were autonomous, but if a problem arose in a particular region they would ask for specialist assistance and a doctor would be drafted from another area. People were no longer required to pay for medical services. Each collective, if it could afford it, would pay a contribution to its health center. Building and facilities were improved and modern equipment introduced. In Barcelona alone, six new hospitals and eight new sanatoriums were opened during the course of the revolution.

As foreseen by writers such as Isaac Puente[24] collectivization in the countryside was easier to implement and was more successful than similar ventures in industry. There were two main reasons for this: firstly, villages and rural communities tend to have a strong sense of community and a collective tradition; secondly, anarchist traditions were particularly strong in the villages.

The military rising had triggered off spontaneous land seizures by the landless peasants and day laborers, particularly the enormous estates of the big landowners, the latifundistas. In other cases, such as in Aragón, land was expropriated by the militias as they advanced against the enemy, turning it over to local peasant syndicates who began to organize themselves along economic and geographic lines with a general assembly of working peasants electing a management committee responsible for economic administration. Small landowners had the choice between individual property and collective ownership. On the whole, no one was forced to join the collective and, likewise, if anyone wanted to leave no barriers were placed in their way. In the village of Peñalba, in Huesca, for example, a third of the collective decided to go ‘individualist’ and a proportion of land was allotted to them. Having chosen to remain outside the community they could not expect to benefit from its services, but they could opt to participate in communal work, if they wished, and they could bring their produce to sell in the communal shops.

A clearer idea of the revolutionary mood that had transformed the Spanish countryside can be seen in the principles expounded in the various charters drawn up by the agrarian collectives that united people on the basis of common work or locality. The charter of one collective, Espluga de Francoli, reads as follows:

‘Article 1 — All those who may constitute the collective to have the same rights and duties.

Article 2 — The collective is to be governed by decisions reached in assembly, the law of the majority prevailing ...

Article 5 — The collective will reward its component families in accordance with the number of members each family may have ...

Article 7 — All members of the cooperative are to have access to the produce in its possession, without money, but a tally is to be kept of all that is issued and on Saturdays an account will be compiles of what may have been acquired, and whatever the difference may be between that and the sum of the family’s entitlement …’[25]

Collectivization involved the takeover of privately owned land and working it under self-management. The agricultural collectives provide the clearest examples of anarchist ideas in action simply because life in the country was less complex in the city. Gaston Leval described the process of social reconstruction through the Collective:

‘… the Collective was born with characteristics of its own. It is not a Syndicate for it encompasses all those who wish to join it whether they are producers in the classic economic sense of not. Then it brings them together at the complete human individual level … Neither is the Collective the municipal Council or what is called the Commune … for it parts company with the political party traditions on which the commune is normally based … the whole population takes part in its management, whether it is a question of a policy for agriculture, for the creation of new industries, for social security, medical service or public education.’[26]

Although anarchist ideas played a crucial role in the revolution, it must be stressed that the collectives were not the creation of the anarchist movement, ‘A great many collectives were created spontaneously by people remote from our movement (‘libertarians’ without being aware of it). Most of the Castile and Extremadura collectives were organized by Catholic and Socialist peasants: in some cases of course they may have been inspired by the propaganda of isolated anarchist militants.’[27]

General assemblies of the people discussed and voted on issues while the day-to-day administrative work of the collectives was carried out by elected teams of workers. Each team nominated a delegate who would meet with the delegates from other teams to co-ordinate the work of the collective. Delegates would be chosen either by their particular team or by the village as a whole. The general assembly of the collective would meet regularly, according to the wishes of the assembly itself. The amount of power the assemblies had varied from place to place; in some places assemblies made day-to-day decisions while in others only major decisions were made by the assembly with elected delegates dealing with the day-to-day affairs of the community.

The collectives were not isolated. One of the functions of the general assemblies was to delegate members to attend meetings of the cantonal federations, above which were the regional federations, the basis of economic coordination. Leval cites an example of this federal system at work:

‘The 900 collectives were brought together in 54 cantonal (local or district) federations which grouped themselves and at the same time subdivided into five provincial federations which at the top level ended with the Regional Committee of the Levante Federation situated in Valencia and which coordinated the whole.’[28]

An example of the large scale of the operations of the Peasant Federation of the Levante if indicated by the fact that it produced more than half the total orange crop in Spain and transported and distributed through its own commercial organization more than 70 per cent of the total harvest. Again, it is important to emphasize that although the federations carried out large-scale operations, the collectives were organized from the bottom up, from the point of production, and remained autonomous units.

As approximately 70 per cent of the rural population was illiterate prior to the revolution, education was an issue of great importance to the collectivists. As the anarchist educational primer, the Cartilla filológica española, urged:

‘Mankind can be divided into the good and the bad. The good and the bad can be subdivided into the literate and the illiterate. Any other division is artificial, false, ridiculous or stupid. The subdivision between literate and illiterate, purely accidental, should not be the reason for vanity among those more fortunate or the cause of shame among those who have not had the good luck or the opportunity to learn. The bad are almost never so bad by nature, but, rather, almost always so as a result of social pressure, injustice, or the influence of bad examples, which circumstances they cannot alter.’

The collectives did not merely content themselves with raising the minimum school leaving age to 14; they built schools and technical and agricultural colleges as well. Due to their efforts, illiteracy was virtually eradicated in the collectives of Aragón, Levant, Castile, Andalucia and Extremadura which led to technical innovation, improved training and modernization of agriculture which greatly boosted production in most areas.

The intellectuals, in their ineptitude in practical work, were inferior to the peasants who made no political speeches, but knew how to organize the new life. Not even the authors of the syndicalist health organi-sation in Catalonia were intellectuals. A Basque doctor with a will of iron, and a few comrades working in hospitals, did everything. In other regions, talented professional men aided the movement. But there too, the initiative came from below. Alcoy’s industries, so well organized, were all managed by the workers, as were those of Elda and Castellón. In Carcagente, in Elda, in Granollers, in Binéfar, in Jativa, in land transport, in marine transport, in the collectives of Castille, or in the semi-socialization of Ripolls and Puigcerdá — the militants at the bottom did everything. As for the government, they were as inept in organizing the economy as in organizing the war.’ Ne Franco ne Stalin′, Milan, 1952.