This is a reply to “Spain’s Social Revolution Against Fascism” which appeared in Jacobin.
Historians do not agree in their take or interpretation of the Spanish revolution and this is clear from the inaccuracies in the piece you published by Andy Durgan.
Let me start with a blatant falsehood by Durgan. He says Joan Garcia Oliver advocated an “anarchist dictatorship.” This is not true. Here is the context: After the CNT’s armed clandestine self defense organization (not mentioned by Durgan) defeated the army in a two-day battle in Barcelona, the CNT called a hasty regional conference of its shop delegates. There was a debate on the way forward. The main speakers in this debate were Joan Garcia Oliver and Federica Montseny. Garcia Oliver was a factory worker militant who was speaking for the unions of Hospitalet – a gritty industrial suburb of Barcelona. Montseny was a key leader on the Peninsular Committee of the FAI and an independent intellectual. The night before at a meeting of local unions Garcia Oliver had said “the unions must take power.” In the debate this led Montseny to accuse Garcia Oliver of advocating an “anarchist dictatorship.” This was a disingenuous play to anarchist prejudices. Garcia Oliver denied this, pointing to the CNT’s status as the majority union, its democratic character and massive membership. You can read about this in Garcia Oliver’s memoir, El Eco de los Pasos. This proposal for the unions taking power was the position of the unions in Hospitalet. Thus they overthrew the city government and replaced it with a union council.
Durgan also fails to note this internal division in the CNT came up again in early September after Francisco Largo Caballero — head of the UGT union and the PSOE — became prime minister. At a conference the CNT developed a position favored by CNT journalists and militia leaders. They proposed to replace the national Republican government with a union governing council with equal representation of the CNT and UGT unions. This was called a “Defense Council” and its job would be to run a unified people’s militia with rank and file of military units having the right to elect half the representatives on the committee managing their unit. The CNT also proposed that the banks would be expropriated and merged into an Iberian People’s Bank and the new government would declare that all industries must be self-managed by the workers. Largo Caballero ultimately vetoed the proposal. At the time Eduardo de Guzman was the managing editor of the CNT daily in Madrid, Castilla Libre. There is an oral history interview with de Guzman in Blood of Spain where he says at that moment it was possible to create “a proletarian government — total working-class democracy in which all sectors of the proletariat — but of the proletariat alone — would be represented….To make a revolution, power must be seized.”
In the region of eastern Aragon, a regional defense council of this sort was elected from the village assemblies. This was an initiative of the CNT village unions in that area. They were able to do this because of the support of Buenaventura Durruti, who commanded a 14,000-member CNT militia army in that area.
This falsifies Durgan’s claim the CNT did not consider how working-class power could be consolidated.
Durgan also gives an inadequate picture of the revolution. First, to correct some mistakes. He says half the economy was expropriated but more recent estimates are 80 percent in Catalonia and 70 percent in Valencia. He says Catalonia had half of Spain’s manufacturing but actually it was around 70 percent.
The seizures of industry were not “spontaneous” as the CNT movement had discussed this for years as an initial step in a revolutionary situation. For example, the Transport Union held a mass meeting of over 6000 transit workers in Barcelona on July 21. This included non-union professional staff such as engineers. They voted overwhelmingly to expropriate the entire transit system of the metropolitan region — streetcars, bus companies, the Metro. This was put under control of a Public Service organization run thru sector councils consisting of elected delegates.
In many industries, after seizing particular companies, the CNT union would merge the assets of all the companies in that industry to realize the industrial union principle of “taking wages and conditions out of competition.” They called this “socialization” as Danny Evans discusses in Revolution and the State.
Entire industries were socialized: Railways, the entertainment industry, furniture manufacture, dairies, the telephone system. In the case of the haircutting industry in the metropolitan Barcelona region, the barber’s union closed all 1100 shops and replaced them with a network of over 200 neighborhood hair-cutting centers, run via the union assemblies. This created tremendous savings which enabled a 40 percent wage increase. Because of anarchism’s emphasis on reason and science there were many anarchist doctors. A group of them in Catalonia organized an industrial union of health care workers with each professional field in it is own union section. This union became the 40,000 member Health Federation — running free clinics throughout the anti-fascist zone and seizing hospitals and drug factories. You can read detailed descriptions of these industrial socialization efforts in Collectives in the Spanish Revolution, written by a person on the ground at the time.
Durgan says half the economy was seized but other historians say 80 percent in Catalonia and 70 percent in Valencia. He says half of Spain’s manufacturing was in Catalonia. That is incorrect; it was 70 percent. With Valencia that’s three-fourths of the country’s manufacturing capacity.
Durgan also says nothing about how gender relations were changed when the “gendered division of labor” in industry was often overthrown, with Mujeres Libres actively involved in this process. Mujeres Libres started as a women’s caucus in the CNT in Catalonia but developed into a 20,000 member working class women’s organization. You can read about this in Free Women of Spain by Martha Ackelsburg.
More details are available in my recent essay at: https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/developing-a-model-of-self-managed-socialism-lessons-from-the-spanish-revolution/