The Spanish Anarchists: the Heroic Years, 1868-1936
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The Spanish Anarchists THE HEROIC YEARS 1868-1936 the text of this book is printed on 100% recycled paper The Spanish Anarchists THE HEROIC YEARS 1868-1936 s Murray Bookchin HARPER COLOPHON BOOKS Harper & Row, Publishers New York, Hagerstown, San Francisco, London memoria de Russell Blackwell -^i amigo y mi compahero Hafold F. Johnson Library Ceirtef' "ampsliire College Anrteret, Massachusetts 01002 A hardcover edition of this book is published by Rree Life Editions, Inc. It is here reprinted by arrangement. THE SPANISH ANARCHISTS. Copyright © 1977 by Murray Bookchin. AH rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission except in the case ofbrief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address ftee Life Editions, Inc., 41 Union Square West, New York, N.Y. 10003. Published simultaneously in Canada by Fitzhenry & Whiteside Limited, Toronto. First HARPER COLOPHON edition published 1978 ISBN: 0-06-090607-3 78 7980 818210 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 21 Contents OTHER BOOKS BY MURRAY BOOKCHIN Introduction ^ Lebensgefahrliche, Lebensmittel (1955) Prologue: Fanelli's Journey ^2 Our Synthetic Environment (1%2) I. The "Idea" and Spain ^7 Crisis in Our Qties (1965) Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971) BACKGROUND MIKHAIL BAKUNIN 22 The Limits of the Qty (1973) Pour Une Sodete Ecologique (1976) II. The Topography of Revolution 32 III. The Beginning THE INTERNATIONAL IN SPAIN 42 IN PREPARATION THE CONGRESS OF 1870 51 THE LIBERAL FAILURE 60 T'he Ecology of Freedom Urbanization Without Cities IV. The Early Years 67 PROLETARIAN ANARCHISM 67 REBELLION AND REPRESSION 79 V. The Disinherited 89 PEASANT ANARCHISM S9 AGRARIAN UNIONS AND UPRISINGS 96 VI. Terrorists and "Saints" ^22 VII. Anarchosyndicalism ^28 THE NEW FERMENT 128 THE "TRAGIC WEEK" 143 VIII. The CNT '58 tHE EARLY YEARS 158 THE POSTWAR YEARS 168 TriE PISTOLEROS 1^6 IX. From Dictatorship to Republic 204 THE PRIMO DE RIVERA DICTATORSHIP 204 THE AZANA COALITION 224 X. The Road to Revolution 254 EL BIENIO NEGRO 254 FROM FEBRUARY TO JULY . 274 XI. Concluding Remarks •302 Bibliographical Essay 315 Index •32S Illustrations Introduction Working with Shouldered Rifle Frontispiece Giuseppi Fanelli 23 It is not widely known to the general reader that the largest Pierre-Joseph Proudhon ig movement in pre-Franco Spain was greatly influenced by Anarchist Mikhail Bakunin 23 ideas. In 1936, on the eve of the Spanish Civil War, approximately a Peter Kropotkin 24 million people were members of the Anarchosyndicalist CNT {Confed- Map of Spain 38-39 eracion Nacional del Trabajo, or National Confederation of Labor)—an Madrid Internationalists 47 immense following if one bears in mind that the Spanish population Anselmo Lorenzo numbered only twenty-four million. Until the victory of Franco, the Raiael Farga Pellicer CNT remained one of the largest labor federations in Spain. Founding Congress of the International in Spain, 1870 49 Barcelona, then the largest industrial city in Spain, became an La Federacion and La Revista Social 76 Anarchosyndicalist enclave within the republic. Its working class, Seals from worker and peasant associations 86 overwhelmingly committed to the CNT, established a far-reaching "Mano Negra" 107 system of syndicalist self-management. Factories, utilities, transport Fermin Salvochea 124 facilities, even retail and wholesale enterprises, were taken over and Francisco Ferrer 134 administered by workers' committees and unions. The city itself was Tragic Week of 1909 147 policed by a part-time guard of workingmen and justice was meted Manuel Buenacasa 152 out by popular revolutionary tribunals. Nor was Barcelona alone in Organizational structure of the CNT 170 this radical reconstruction of economic and social life; the movement, Salvador Segui 181 in varying degrees, embraced Valencia, Malaga, CNT-controlled fac Angel Pestana 181 tories in the large Basque industrial cities, and smaller communities CNT demonstration in 1931 209 such as Lerida, Alcoy, Granollers, Gerona, and Rubi. Saragossa strike in the early 1930's 229 Many of the land laborers and peasants of Andalusia were also Casas Viejas 238 Anarchist in outlook. During the first few weeks of the Civil War, Durruti, Ascaso, Oliver, Lecoin and Vivancos 258 before the south of Spain was overrun by fascist armies, these rural Durruti, Ascaso and their wives 259 people established communal systems of land tenure, in some cases Black and red flags symbolizing Spanish Anarchosyndicalism 267 abolishing the use of money for internal transactions, establishing Preparations for July 19,1936 276 free, communistic systems of production and distribution, and creat Fighting in Barcelona, July 19-20, 1936 276 ing a decision-making procedure based on popular assemblies and Victory 280 direct, face-to-face democracy. Perhaps even more significant were The people in arms 292 the well-organized Anarchist collectives in Republican-held areas of Ascaso, moments before his death 293 Aragon, which were grouped into a network under the Council of Mass demonstration of the CNT, FAI, and AIT 314 •J Aragon, largely under ^he control of the CNT. Collectives tended to predominate in many areas of Catalonia and the Levant, and were common even in Socialist-controlled Castile. These experiences alone, so challenging to popular notions of a 2 Introduction Introduction 3 hbertanan society as an unworkable Utopia, would warrant a book on Spanish Anarchism. But they also have a certain intrinsic interest To general reader, and it is primarily for this reader that I have written anyone with a concern for novel social forms, the Anarchist collec the present volume. tives of Spam raise many fascinating questions: how were the collec To a certain extent I have been researching the materials for this tive farms and factories established? How well did they work? Did book since the early 1960s. In 1967 I began systematically to gather they create, any administrative difficulties? These collectives data with a view toward writing it during a lengthy trip to Europe, moreover were not mere experiments created by idle dreamers; thev where I interviewed exiled Spanish Anarchists. The present volume emerged from a dramatic social revolution that was to mark the was almost entirely completed by 1969. At that time virtually no c imax and tragic end—of the traditional workers' movement High- literature existed in English on Spanish Anarchism except for Gerald hghtang the reconstructive efforts of the Anarchists was the Spanish Brenan's empathetic but rather dncomplete accounts in The Spanish Uvil War Itself, an unforgettable conflict that was to last nearly three' Labyrinth and the largely personal narratives of Franz Borkenau and bitter years, claim an estimated million lives, and stir the deepest George Orwell. Apart from these works, the scanty referer(ces to the passions of people throughout the world. Spanish Anarchists in English seemed appallingly insensitive to the No less significant was the development of the Spanish Anarchist ideals of a very sizable section of the Spanish people. Even today, movement from the 1870s to the mid-1930s-its forms of organiza- most of the works on Spain by conservative, liberal, and Marxist hon. Its influence on the hves of ordinary workers and peasants its writers offer no serious appraisal of the libertarian viewpoint and internal conflicts, and its varied fortunes. For Spanish Anarchism exhibit shocking malice toward its so-called "extreme" wing as rep remained above all a peoples' movement, reflecting the cherished resented by the Anarchist action groups. It may well be felt by many Ideals, dreams, and values of ordinary individuals, not an esoteric students of Spanish Anarchism that I have gone to another extreme. credo and tightly knit professional party far removed from the every Perhaps—but it seemed especially important to me, whatever my day expenences of the villager and factory Worker. The resiliency and personal reservations, that the voices of these groups be expressed tenaoty that.kept Spanish Anarchism alive in urban barrios and rural with a greater degree of understanding than they have generally pueblos ior nearly seventy years, despite unrelenting persecution, is received. understandable only if we view this movement as an expression of The Spanish Civil War, in fact, was very much part of my own life plebian Spanish society itself rather than as a body of exotic liberta- and affected me more deeply than any other conflict in a lifetime that nan doctrines. has seen a terrible international war and the decades of nearly chronic The present volume (the first of two that will trace the history of warfare that followed it. My sympathies, indeed my Utter devotion, he movement up to the current period) is primarily concerned with lay with the Spanish left, whiA I initially identified as a very young e organizational and social issues that marked the years of Spanish man with the Communist Party and, later, as the Civil War came to its Anarchism's ascendency and, finally, of its drift toward civil war—a terrible close, with the POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificacion Marxista). span of time I have designated as its "heroic period." Despite the By the late 1950s, however, I had become more informed about fascination that the collectives of 1936-39 hold for us, I believe it is Spanish Anarchism, a movement that had been little known to immensely rewarding to explore how ordinary workers and peasants American radicals of the 1930s, and began to study its origins and tor nearly three generations managed to build the combative organ trajectory. As one who had lived through the Spanish Civil War izations that formed the underpinning of these collectives; how they period, indeed, who vividly recalled the uprising of the Asturian managed to claim for themselves and incorporate in their everyday miners in October 1934,1 thought it all the more necessary to correct lives revolutionary societies and unions that we normally relegate to the false image that, if it existed in my mind, almost certainly existed the work place and the political sphere.