General Francisco Franco’s attempt to prevent social revolution in Spain began with a fascist coup d’état. Launched on 17-18 July 1936, the military putsch led by the Spanish general produced a paradoxical outcome: it unleashed the proletarian insurrection it had sought to forestall. At the heart of this upheaval was Barcelona, the epicentre of the Spanish revolution.
On 21 July, plumes of smoke still rose above Barcelona, its streets criss-crossed with barricades and littered with cartridges. This was a reminder of the furious fighting of the previous days, when armed workers routed the Francoists. In the saddle were the anarchists of the National Confederation of Labour and the Iberian Anarchist Federation. Their acronyms, CNT-FAI, were blazoned atop barricades, postered walls, commandeered cars, occupied factories, and on the banners of the militias marching westwards to fight fascism. That evening, scores of anarchist delegates gathered in the movement’s headquarters to discuss what to do next. The previous day, 20 July, the head of the Catalan regional government within the Spanish Republic, Lluís Companys had offered them power. The anarchists, he acknowledged, were the real masters of the situation.
How did the anarchist movement, which had long rejected state power, find itself in such a position? Months later, its leaders would ultimately join the Spanish government, suppressing the very revolution the anarchist rank-and-file had made possible. The story of Spanish anarchism shows us what happens when revolutionary power is surrendered to the old bourgeois state. The promise of July 1936 was the possibility of a society governed by workers and the oppressed; its tragedy was that the embryonic workers’ power that existed at that time was not transformed into a new revolutionary authority.
The emergence of Spanish anarchism as an organised movement can be traced to the autumn of 1868, when the Russian anarchist oracle Mikhail Bakunin dispatched one of his most talented agitators, the Italian Giuseppe Fanelli, to the Iberian Peninsula. Bakunin was attempting to prop up his forces within the International Workingmen’s Association, founded in 1864 by his adversary Karl Marx. Fanelli held several meetings in Madrid and Barcelona and disseminated the most important Bakuninist tracts. Anarchism soon spread like wildfire across Spain, which became an anarchist stronghold in the First International until its dissolution in 1876. The First International was the first attempt to organise the working class on a global basis, although it was riven by conflict from the outset, with its national sections divided between Marxists and Bakuninists.
In part, anarchism’s popularity in Spain can be explained by economic factors which favoured the Bakuninists. The oppressive role of the state, the church, and the landlords in Spain’s southern villages chimed with anarchism’s call for the destruction of all forms of power. In industrial Catalonia, small workshops predominated, and workers took pride in their skills and profession. This was fertile ground for anarchism’s federal and decentralised understanding of trade unionism, known as anarcho-syndicalism. These ideas inspired the creation of the National Confederation of Labour (CNT) in 1910, a mass trade union movement led by anarchists.
Yet economic factors alone cannot explain the rise of the anarchists. Political causes also worked in their favour. The Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), founded in 1879, became the anarchists’ main competitor. The PSOE adhered to a moderate, reformist interpretation of Marxism. The anarchists sought to outcompete the socialists by presenting themselves as uncompromising defenders of revolution..
The Russian Revolution of 1917 drew many anarchists towards Bolshevism, the revolutionary movement led by Vladimir Lenin that seized state power in Russia in the name of mass workers’ councils known in Russian as soviets. The anarchists capitalised on the popularity of the Russian Revolution and affiliated to the Communist International. Between 1917-20, many came to accept Marxist concepts such as the dictatorship of the proletariat, the idea that workers should adopt repressive measures to fend off counterrevolution. In their eyes, Russia’s soviets (councils) were genuine organs of workers’ democracy.
The intoxication with Leninism, however, was short lived. By late 1920, the class struggle in Spain, as across Europe, began to wane. The capitalist counteroffensive culminated in the military coup d’état of General Primo de Rivera in September 1923, which installed a seven-year dictatorship. The Spanish Communist Party, created by dissident socialists, emerged as an unwelcome competitor for the anarchists. Retrenching to unadulterated anarchism, the CNT shielded its social base from communist influence. It thus became one of the few remaining mass anarchist movements in the interwar period, at a time when in most countries, communists and socialists had displaced anarchists from the helm of the labour movement.
Under Primo de Rivera’s military dictatorship, trade union activity declined sharply and the CNT lost many members. In its place, other forms of activity gained prominence. For example, many anarchists combatted the regime through armed struggle. Others focused on propaganda and cultural work. The Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI), created in 1927, reflected this greater emphasis on political agitation as opposed to trade union activism. The dictatorship, however, was riddled with divisions and Primo de Rivera fell in 1930 in a context of social unrest. The CNT reemerged from its ashes, working closely with the FAI. A few months later, in April 1931, local elections gave a resounding victory to the republican parties. Alfonso XIII, the unpopular monarch who had backed the dictatorship, fled, and the Spanish Second Republic was declared amidst popular uproar.
The Republic’s vague promises of justice and equality would soon come up against the hard realities of Spanish capitalism. The anarchists became inebriated with the republican furore of spring 1931. They rapidly became disappointed. The socialist-republican coalition that came to power in 1931 disappointed many as it failed to implement serious reforms. By the end of the year, the CNT-FAI swung to the opposite extreme, organising scattered revolts against the Republic that were invariably crushed.
In a bout of sectarianism, most anarchists turned their backs on the anti-fascist movement of 1934, which saw the sharp radicalisation of the PSOE. In January 1933, Hitler had come to power in Germany. In Spain, conservatives had won the elections in November 1933. This caused alarm among Spanish workers. The left-wing faction in the PSOE came to embody this effervescence, threatening to stage an armed revolutionary uprising to prevent the fascists from taking over. The anarchists, however, profoundly mistrusted the PSOE, especially after its participation in the coalition governments of 1931-33.
This process culminated in a socialist-led insurrection against a new right-wing coalition in October 1934. Except in Asturias (where the revolution triumphed for two weeks), the anarchists rejected the movement. The sectarianism of 1932-35 divided and demoralised their ranks. By early 1936, they veered again towards moderation. In the elections of February that year, they tacitly backed the centre-left Popular Front coalition. This was a broad anti-fascist alliance uniting republicans, socialists, and communists.
The anarchists’ political zigzags of these years revealed a naïve view of politics. The coming of the Republic rendered the political scene more complex. In this context, the anarchists’ simplistic outlook resulted in a series of kneejerk swings rightwards and leftwards, as they oscillated between rejecting the state altogether and accommodating it.
When the revolution came in 1936, the anarchists were forced to confront a decisive question: consolidate revolutionary power or collaborate with the state. We are back at the assembly of 21 July 1936. The assembly decided to reject the conquest of power as contrary to the anarchist creed, which rejected all authority. Instead, they decided to collaborate with the remnants of the Republic in the fight against Franco. The Republic, which hung by a thread in the summer, reaffirmed its authority. Conditions of civil war accelerated the centralisation of political power. Confronted with this situation, the anarchists effected a peculiar volte-face: they joined the Spanish government in November, claiming that the republican state had ceased to be a force of oppression.
The problem, however, was that the strengthening of the Republic was accompanied by an onslaught against the gains of the revolution of July: the militias, workers’ control of industry, land collectivisation, etc. The dominant factions in the ruling Popular Front government sought to keep the anti-fascist war effort within the bounds of capitalist democracy, which, they hoped, would dispel the suspicions of the French and British governments and budge them out of their neutrality. From Moscow, Joseph Stalin was similarly trying to woo Paris and London into an alliance against Hitler. His followers in Spain in the Communist Party became the staunchest defenders of republican legality.
The republican authorities argued that it was necessary to centralise the war effort, and that the scattered militias and workers’ committees were inefficient. To some extent, they were right. Civil war demands discipline and authority. However, there was an alternative to the centralisation of power around the old capitalist state: to organise the workers’ committees into a new power that would do away with the old Republic. Such an authority would wage revolutionary war against fascism, appealing to the workers of the world for solidarity. In other words, the CNT-FAI could have created a workers’ state, as opposed to the bourgeois Republic. This was the ideal of soviet democracy that had been implemented in the early years of the Russian Revolution and that had so inspired the Spanish anarchists at the time. But in July 1936 the leadership of the CNT-FAI did not contemplate this possibility. This reveals the failure of anarchism as a revolutionary ideology.
The new anarchist ministers assisted the onslaught against the revolution. This awakened opposition from the CNT-FAI rank-and-file, articulated by figures such as militia leader Buenaventura Durruti (who was killed on the front in November 1936). Feeling power slip from their hands, thousands of workers in Barcelona, most of them members of the CNT-FAI, rose in arms in May 1937 against the counterrevolutionary course of events. While the insurgents soon conquered most of the city, the rebellion was directionless. The official heads of the CNT-FAI called for an end to the fighting and the insurrection fizzled out. The triumphant Republic proceeded to dismantle the revolution. The Spanish Civil War now became a conflict in struggle for the defence of bourgeois democracy. It dragged on for almost two more years until Franco’s final victory. Demoralised by their own mistakes, mauled by the Stalinists and hunted down by the Francoists, the anarchists entered a prolonged decline. Seventy years of anarchist history thus came to an inglorious end.