Anarchism in Spain (1976)

Book Review from the August 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

Collectives in the Spanish Revolution by Gaston Leval (Freedom Press, £2.00)

In the months following the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War about 1,5000 collectives were formed, mainly in the countryside and small towns, under anarchist influence. This book gives details of the organization of a number of them, and presents the anarchist view of the conflict in Spain.

Leval starts with an account of the Spanish anarcho-syndicalist movement in the last quarter of the 19th century. As elsewhere in Europe, there were organizations with large memberships and journals with circulations reaching 50,000. For their decline into irresolute factions Leval blames Marx, Engels and Lafargue, and the importation of “deviations” from France. However, had the movement been founded on understanding instead of the emotionalism he commends (“the ideal dwells deep in the Spanish soul”), its supporters would not have been so easily persuaded by whoever came along.

In his visit to Spain in 1872 Lafargue noted: “The agricultural workers live in the towns and villages like other labourers, with whom they are continually in touch; it is for this reason that so many peasants take part in the insurrectionary movements (Engels-Lafargue Correspondence, Moscow, Vol. 1, p.27). When the Civil War began in July 1936 the harvest awaited gathering-in, and the collectives were initially a movement by municipalities to organize labour and supplies in that emergency.

Anarchists and other radicals keenly fostered this sudden opportunity to apply their ideas and were helped by the fact, as Leval states, that “in general the Catalan industrial bourgeoisie was anti-francoist”. The collectives helped arms production and transport, and organized distribution; the Aragon Federation substituted ration-books for money. Inevitably, they in turn required military protection. Leval and his translator, Vernon Richards, are both self-conscious about this. Leval speaks of “libertarian troops” and says: “It is true that the presence of these forces . . . favoured indirectly those constructive achievements by preventing active resistance by the supporters of the bourgeois republic and of fascism.” They were at war, weren’t they?

The “bourgeois republic” contained four anarchist Ministers. Leval criticizes the “socialist and republican leaders” for not introducing “daring reforms” before the Civil War; their failure, he says, created support for Franco. That was the background to the rise of other European dictatorships — the inability of reformist labour governments to make parliamentary democracy appear worthwhile.

The collectives do provide an example, within limits and special circumstances, of communal organization and to answer to those who say workers by themselves could not manage anything. They also provide a lesson for anarchists. Leval speaks more than once of necessary “workshop disciplines” and tells how “workers wishing to advance to a higher category . . . were required to undergo an examination in theory and practice before the central council of the Syndicate and workshop delegates”. Yet anarchists still wax indignant over Engels' “authority letter”, written apropos Spain in 1871:

Whether it be the will of a majority of voters, of a leading committee, or of one man, it is still a will imposed on the dissentients; but without that single will, no co-operation is possible. Go and run one of the big Barcelona factories without direction, that is, without authority!

B.B.