Anarchist collectives in the Spanish Revolution.

 

Spanish Anarchist militia men and women

The Spanish anarcho-syndicalists of the CNT collectivised not just agriculture but much of industry in Catalonia as well as the public transport system in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War 1936-39. It is probably the only time when anarchism has been put into practice. Firms were put under workers' control. The Ritz Hotel in Barcelona was turned into a workers' restaurant.

Not all Spanish peasants wanted to be collectivised nor were they sympathetic to anarchism. Anarchism was always quite strong in Andalusia but it wasn't in a conservative province like Navarre. It has been alleged that the anarchist forced the peasantry into agricultural collectives in much the same way that the Bolsheviks had done in the Soviet Union. For me, this rather defeats the point, because as we know from the Russian experience of collectivisation, forcing people into collectives doesn't really work and it didn't work in the Soviet Union.

The Bolsheviks really detested the peasantry and the peasantry didn't think much of them or their policy of expropriating peasant property and grain requisitioning by force. Karl Marx wrote about 'rural idiocy'. During the Russian civil war of 1918-21, the Bolsheviks fought a war against both the White Army and the Russian peasantry.

I have read Gaston Leval's book 'Collectives in the Spanish Revolution', and he suggests that the Spanish peasantry joined the collectives when they thought it was worthwhile to do so. Although the anarchist Jose Buenaventura Durutti, said they were building "Libertarian Communism" in Spain, the Communists in Spain detested these agricultural collectives and if Leval is to be believed, people like the Spanish Communist International Brigade Commander, Enrique Lister, spent a great deal of their time physically attacking them. Lister had been given the job of restoring government authority in the anarchist collectives of Aragon.

The Spanish socialist had a slogan which said vote Communist and spare Spain from Marxism.