The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939

The Catalan president had presented the anarchists with a fundamental dilemma. García Oliver described the alternatives: ‘Libertarian communism, which is tantamount to an anarchist dictatorship, or democracy which signifies collaboration.’⁹ Imposing their social and economic self-management on the rest of the population appeared to violate libertarian ideals more than collaborating with political parties. Abad de Santillán said that they did not believe in any form of dictatorship, including their own.¹⁰

At their Saragossa conference only seven weeks before, the anarchists had affirmed that each political philosophy should be allowed to develop the form of social co-existence which best suited it. This meant working alongside other political bodies with mutual respect for each other’s differences. Though genuine, this was a simplistic view, since the very idea of worker control and self-management was anathema both to liberal republicans and the communists. These two groups would in time win, first by forcing the anarchists to renounce many of their principles and then by expelling them from positions of power.¹¹

Even if the anarchist leaders sitting in the Catalan president’s ornate office, having just been offered the keys of the kingdom, could have foreseen the future, their choice would have been no easier. They had the strength to turn Catalonia and Aragón into an independent non-state almost overnight, but that would have created a major confrontation with the socialists and communists at a critical moment. The Madrid government also controlled the gold reserves, and a boycott by the rest of republican Spain and by foreign companies could have destroyed the Catalonian economy in a very short time. Yet what seems to have influenced their decision the most were the obvious needs of unity to fight the military rising and concern for their comrades in other parts of Spain. The demands of solidarity overrode other considerations. They could not abandon them in a minority which might be crushed by the Marxists.

The libertarian leaders therefore proposed a joint control of Catalonia with other parties. On their recommendation the Central Committee of the Anti-Fascist Militias was set up on 21 July. Although in the majority, they said that they would recognize the right of minorities and take only five of the fifteen posts. Ingenuously, they hoped that they would receive similar treatment in the other areas of republican Spain where they were in a minority.¹²

The Central Committee of Anti-Fascist Militias literally ran everything from security and essential services to welfare; the Generalitat was nothing more than a shadow government, or rather a government-in-waiting, ‘a merely formulaic artefact’.¹³ Its councillors might make plans and charts, but they had little to do with what was already being put into practice on the ground. The all-important conversion to war industry had been started by Juan García Oliver and Eugenio Vallejo during the initial fighting. The Generalitat did not set up a war industries commission until August and for a long time it had little influence,¹⁴ yet although the Catalan administration had lost the political initiative, it had not entirely lost power. The CNT was incapable of controlling either the economy, which stayed in the hands of the Generalitat, or the banking system, which was now in the hands of the socialist UGT.

The contradictions of political power were to confront the anarchists in many forms. Their manifesto of 1917, for example, had condemned all festivals, such as bullfights and indecent cabarets which can brutalize the people. But to act as dictatorial censors was an even worse affront to their beliefs. Meanwhile the anarcho-feminist Mujeres Libres, now 30,000 strong,¹⁵ were sticking posters over the walls of the red light district, trying to persuade prostitutes to give up their way of life. They offered and ran training courses for them to acquire skills for productive work, but other anarchists were less patient. According to the sympathetic French observer Kaminski, they shot pimps and drug dealers on the spot.

A notable phenomenon of the war was the spontaneous growth of a women’s movement after the 1936 elections. It was born, not of literature or theory from abroad (except perhaps a few translations of Emma Goldman), but of women’s instinctive conviction that the overthrow of the class system should mean the end of the patriarchal system as well. The anarchists had always declared the equality of all human beings, but as the Mujeres Libres emphasized, relationships still remained feudal. The most blatant way in which the anarchists had failed to live up to their professed ideals was the different levels of pay for men and women in most CNT enterprises. The Socialist Youth was another major focal point for feminism.