Spain in the 1930s was ripe for revolution. In 1931, generals transitioned the country from military rule to democracy. However, a Popular Front coalition of the Socialist, Communist and liberal Republican parties, and after that a violently repressive far-right government, failed to halt the rising class struggle.
Within the workers’ movement, the dominant force was the National Confederation of Labour (CNT), an anarcho-syndicalist union confederation, explicitly committed to the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. There were multiple tendencies within the CNT. One of the most important was the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI), which formed in 1927 as the self-declared radical anarchists committed to revolution in opposition to a perceived reformist trend in the CNT.
In February 1936, the Popular Front returned to power. The CNT leadership correctly predicted that the military would launch a coup in response and began preparations to resist. On 17 July, the coup began in Spanish Morocco. That same day, FAI members leafleted factory gates with a flyer reading: “The fascist danger, at this moment, is no longer a threat, but a bloody reality...This is no longer the time to hesitate”. The next day, the CNT declared a “revolutionary general strike”. Millions of workers participated.
In Barcelona, CNT defence committees emerged to lead the resistance. These were small groups of experienced militants, some having existed for years, operating in their local neighbourhoods. Since the February elections, they had been preparing for this very moment. Just hours after ringing the factory sirens (the agreed signal the rebellion had begun) they were guarding barricades throughout the city. A few days later, a mass uprising had defeated the fascist rebellion in Barcelona, Madrid and other key cities.
But the workers did not stop at defensive measures. Without any instructions from their leaders, they began collectivising their workplaces. Metalworkers, for example, furnished thick metal sheets onto requisitioned trucks to convert them into armoured vehicles. The nature of production changed overnight, as the transport union explained: “We do not speak of profits— since after deducting staff wages, repair costs and a small reserve fund, the surplus will be handed over to the people for the support of other organisations that may be in need”.
Revolutionary elan took over. Long queues formed outside offices to enlist in workers’ militias. The railway union reported that hundreds of its members had signed up within a fortnight. The General Motors factory sent its first contingent to the front soon after.
In the working-class districts of Barcelona, revolutionary neighbourhood committees formed, often expansions of the defence committees. They converted hotels into communal kitchens, enforced price caps, established militias to patrol the streets, collected taxes, set up schools, expropriated stores and distributed their products, and formed revolutionary tribunals. In some areas, money was briefly replaced by a voucher system administered by the committees. In countless Catalan towns, similar committees formed. In many areas, the local government fled, leaving them as the sole authority.
In other major cities, the collapse of the state was not as deep as in Barcelona, but the workers’ organisations could still exert control. A police officer’s report from Madrid, where the police returned to duty after a few days, shows how this played out. In the report, he recounts his interaction with a militia leader conducting a property search:
“I told him categorically that we were not leaving, as we had to be present for all proceedings carried out there, and by doing so, we were fulfilling the orders of the Director of Security and the Minister of the Interior. He replied that those gentlemen were nobody to them and that if they had to take anyone into custody, they would do so over the Police, the Director, and the Minister.”
The police withdrew.
The July days are often described as “spontaneous.” Although there is always an element of spontaneity in any mass movement, the driving force on the ground was the thousands of hardened CNT militants with years of experience, who were following plans drawn up weeks or months earlier. These pre-existing networks, which included groups of dozens or hundreds of members in the biggest workplaces, were what allowed the revolution to move so quickly from the defensive actions of defeating the coup to the offensive actions of collectivising workplaces and forming revolutionary committees to run society.
The CNT’s leading role is also testament to the organisation the anarchist leaders had built over the preceding decades. When all other workers’ organisations had failed to halt the rise of fascism across Europe, the CNT had proven that not only could it be resisted, but that to do so revolution was both possible and necessary.
When the CNT National Committee met on 29 July, the Catalan delegate reported that the CNT holds “hegemony in all areas in Catalonia. In the towns, comrades are organising life in every aspect. So much so that to travel throughout Catalonia today, one needs authorisation from the CNT”. Thrust into such a position, the question of power, long a matter of theory, became concrete. The Republican zone was in a dual power situation. In Catalonia and other areas, the committees exercised power, almost all of them led by the CNT.
On 21 July, a meeting of the Catalan CNT leadership debated whether to seize power or collaborate with the Catalan Republican parties by creating a “Central Committee of Anti-fascist Militias” (CCMA). The CCMA was a proposal from Luis Companys, Republican president of the Generalidad, as the Catalan government was known. By incorporating the CNT leaders into a cross-class, ambiguously defined new body for which the CNT leaders would be responsible, Companys’ plan was to salvage any remaining legitimacy the Republicans had, while buying time to reconstruct the capitalist state.
Although a wing of the CNT leaders argued for a seizure of power, in the end all but one delegate voted to form the CCMA. FAI leader Federica Montseny explained the decision, writing that a seizure of power “meant establishing a dictatorship, as Lenin and Trotsky had done in Russia, isolating ourselves from the rest of Spain and assuming the responsibility of being forced to eliminate many of those who had shared with us the dangers of the struggle against the enemy”.
All the anarchist leaders understood that a seizure of power necessarily implied establishing a workers’ state—a centralised body to coordinate the revolutionary forces, oversee the collectivised workplaces and defeat the counter-revolution—what Marx famously called the “dictatorship of the proletariat”. But as committed anarchists and opponents of all authority, the CNT leaders saw no fundamental difference between a capitalist state and a revolutionary workers’ state. As Montseny said in a speech just weeks later:
“We do not want to impose ourselves on anyone because that is not how the Revolution is made ... we do not believe in any government, regardless of how revolutionary it may be, because they all limit and stifle freedom”.
What they failed to understand is that a state is a tool of class domination. This is why the representatives of the bourgeoisie were so determined to revive the capitalist state. To refuse a workers’ state was not an honourable act of anti-authoritarian principle, but an act of surrender— the explicit renunciation of working-class power. But the anarchist leaders had not just rejected a workers’ state. In the context of dual power, anything less than the complete overthrow of the state was, in practice, to support its continued existence. By forming the CCMA, they blew oxygen onto the dying embers of the capitalist state.
The 21 July meeting is important, therefore, because it established the CNT’s position on the key question of the revolution: should the working class take power? The CNT leaders answered emphatically in the negative, despite its members in practice ruling in the factories and on the streets.
Although some of the CNT leaders tried to maintain the supremacy of the CCMA over the Generalidad, the capitalist state began to impose itself however it could. Its repressive apparatus had largely disintegrated but its economic power remained significant. The national government in Madrid still controlled the Treasury, state banks and foreign trade. Control over these institutions allowed the Republicans to control key financial resources and materials. They wasted no time in starving key factories of raw materials, forcing lay-offs and reducing work hours. The CNT may have reigned supreme on the factory floor, but the state held enormous power over the factories themselves.
Next, the Republican parties began to rebuild their forces of repression. In August, the national government set up an inspectorate to oversee the militias in the areas where it still had some authority. Weeks later, it had taken control of wage payment to many militias—a major step in eventually converting them into a reconstituted army under their control. Similarly, the Socialist Treasurer, Juan Negrín, in late 1936, began building up the border police in order to reassert state control over the borders and internal checkpoints, which were under de facto CNT control. The expanded force answered directly to the treasurer and was populated with allies of the government. Within months it had expanded from a relatively small force to 40,000 soldiers.
Having accepted that the revolution must be subordinated to the war and that the capitalist state must remain in power, the anarchist leaders could only follow the logical conclusion of this position. In late October, the Catalan leaders joined the Generalidad and dissolved the CCMA. Days later, they supported a decree dissolving the revolutionary committees.
Importantly, many of the committees refused to accept their dissolution. It was not the first or last time the leadership would struggle to impose its program on the rank and file. A few weeks earlier, under pressure to give up their guns, the Barcelona committees met and released a statement:
“The defence groups will not lay down their arms while the problem of political power is still unresolved and there is an armed force that obeys the Madrid government and that isn’t under workers’ control. Our weapons are the best guarantee of the revolutionary conquests.”
On 4 November, the CNT leadership completed its capitulation when four of them, including Montseny, entered that same Madrid government of Socialist Francisco Largo Caballero. In justification, Solidaridad Obrera, the CNT’s main organ, wrote, “At the present time, the government, as the instrument that controls the organs of the State, has ceased to be a force of oppression against the working class”. Months earlier, another of its major papers, CNT, had stated that the state “is and always will be a tool of oppression used by one class against another”.
Their first act was to abandon the capital as part of the government’s relocation to Valencia as the fascist forces were closing in. In the junta that was left in charge, the Communist Party quickly became the leading force. For Stalin, the potential fall of Madrid was a grave risk to his alliance with Britain and France, so the Communist International ordered that the party’s best leaders and members stay in the capital to defend it. Since July, the Stalinists had been the most antirevolutionary force in the Popular Front, constantly attacking the revolutionary committees. But facing what they deemed to be an existential threat, they were forced to change tack. One of their lines now became: “Every house a fortress, every street a trench, every neighbourhood a wall of iron and warriors”.
As in the July days, countless committees re-emerged or formed to lead the resistance, defeating the fascist offensive in weeks. It was a monumental achievement. When the government abandoned the city, it was taken as a sign that Madrid was just days away from being yet another European capital to fall to fascism. Instead, it became one of the twentieth century’s great working-class victories, from which the famous slogan “No pasaran” was born.
The battle of Madrid was a turning point in the revolution for two reasons. Firstly, the Communist Party’s authority significantly increased. It had won the leadership of the Madrid UGT, the Socialist party’s union confederation; it had close ties with the top echelon of the military leaders, some of whom had become card-carrying members; and, crucially, it had the link to Soviet Russia, which, by late 1936, had some 3,000 military advisers in Spain and was supplying tanks and planes. With this new authority, it reverted back to its counter-revolutionary line and became the main force in the government pushing for a direct confrontation with the CNT to put an end to the rule of the committees and restore the capitalist state.
Secondly, the successful defence of Madrid intensified the key division within the anarchist movement, which was over the question of collaboration. There had been a growing movement of “anticollaborationists” since the July Days that now began to push harder for a new approach. They also took confidence from the other defining slogan of the battle: “Long live Madrid without government”. To them, and countless rank-and-file CNT members, the battle of Madrid represented a “Second July,” a moment not only to revive the revolution but to advance it.
With the confidence of successfully defending Madrid, from late 1936 the CNT base further radicalised and began pushing the revolution forward against the leadership, which continued to make further concessions. At the same time, the national government and Generalidad in Catalonia, encouraged by the Communist Party, ramped up its repression against the CNT.
One example of the radicalisation was in L’Hospitalet, an anarchist stronghold on the outskirts of Barcelona. It was an important area because the main leader was Jose Xena, the only delegate in the 21 July meeting to vote against collaboration with the existing state. Like so many other Catalan towns and Barcelona neighbourhoods, in the early days of the revolution the CNT section in L’Hospitalet established its own local revolutionary committee, although a few months later it succumbed to pressure from the leadership and dissolved, with the local CNT entering the municipal government with the Popular Front parties. However, in December, the L’Hospitalet CNT began a “socialisation campaign” to bring more industries under union control. In response, the Popular Front abandoned the municipal government, leaving it exclusively under CNT control with Xena as the local mayor.
A reflection of the internal fracturing within the CNT over collaboration was the struggle over the anarchist press. After the battle of Madrid, the CNT national secretary was ousted and replaced by FAI member Mariano Vazquez. Vazquez immediately began a purge of any editors and writers critical of collaboration. His main target was Liberto Callejas, the lead editor of Solidaridad Obrera during the revolution. Callejas had regularly published front-page editorials from prominent anti-collaborationists. But Vazquez was determined to stamp out any trace of critique within the anarchist press. Shortly after Callejas’ ouster, Felipe Alaiz, the editor of the FAI’s key organ, Tierra y Libertad, was similarly replaced.
This provoked some dissent. At a special congress in Barcelona in February 1937, Vazquez’s editorial pick was confirmed with the support of delegates representing 305,000 members, but Callejas and Alaiz received the support of delegates representing a combined 168,000 members.
Increasingly losing control of the membership, the CNT leadership cracked down, threatening to cut funding to critical local sections. But by early 1937, an organisational break had occurred. One of the most important new groups was the Friends of Durruti. The Friends had some 5,000 members in Barcelona not long after forming and staked themselves out as oppositional to collaboration by calling for a “revolutionary junta” to replace the Generalidad.
By April 1937, tensions in Barcelona had reached a fever pitch. The CNT base was no longer willing to sit back and let the counter-revolution advance. Increasingly, a section of middle-ranking cadres and some leaders followed suit. On 13 April, for example, Xena told a Barcelona rally: “We cannot be held back by the idea of first winning the war, and leaving the revolution until later, because they are indissolubly connected. Separating them would betray the hopes of the world working class, who see in us the beginnings of their own liberation”.
The final straw came on 3 May when the Assault Guard, under the command of the PSUC (the Catalan Communist party), attempted to seize the telephone exchange, a symbol of workers’ power that the CNT had controlled since July. Street fighting broke out between the Generalidad’s forces and the various revolutionary committees and militias. After a few days, the government was victorious.
The Communist Party and other forces spent the following weeks unleashing a reign of terror, assassinating dozens of anarchists and members of the anti-Stalinist socialists in the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification (POUM), who had also fought on the barricades. Although the various anti-collaborationist organisations attempted to regroup in the months after, they couldn’t overcome the defeat of the May Days. The civil war would continue until 1939, but the May Days were the decisive turning point of the revolution. Over the next two years, the CNT leaders drifted further down the path of collaboration, joining successive Popular Front governments.
The defeat was by no means inevitable. Instead, it was the result of the politics which dominated the workers’ movement.
At the core of anarchism’s shortcomings was a classless rejection of authority. This is what underpinned the CNT leaders’ refusal to seize power in July 1936, which in practice meant leaving the existing state in place. Indeed, their political goal, what they called “libertarian communism,” emphasised individual freedom from any and all authority, rather than collective, democratic control of society’s resources. This meant individual producers or workplaces being “free” of overseeing, centralised bodies. As Tierra y Libertad, the FAI’s key organ, wrote: “We accept the collaboration of all, with no one in command—federation without authority, public service without bureaucracy”.
The problem with conflating the authority of the organised working class with that of the capitalist class, and consequently abstaining from the battle between the two, is that in practice it means accepting the continued existence and dominance of the capitalist state. As the anarchist leaders discovered after the July Days, the ruling class does not simply concede defeat in the face of revolution—it has to be overthrown and disarmed by an alternative power. Without such a power, the capitalist class can and will rebuild its institutional dominance, just as the Republicans did.
This raises the crucial question of what institutions the working class must build in order to win. The obvious comparison is with the Russian Revolution—1917 in Russia and 1936 in Spain demonstrate two very different approaches to revolutionary theory and action.
In Spain, dual power took the form of a severely weakened Republican state and a smattering of revolutionary committees that, generally speaking, remained disconnected. The committees were mostly unelected, with delegates appointed by the relevant parties and unions based on their respective strength on the ground.
In Russia, dual power took the form of the soviets (workers’ councils) on one side, and the pro-capitalist provisional government on the other. The soviets quickly became mass, democratic institutions of the working class. Within days of the Petrograd soviet forming in the February revolution, there were daily sessions of hundreds of delegates elected in the workplaces and barracks. Just weeks later, more than 70 cities had established their own soviet, and two months later the All-Russian Conference of Soviets met with representatives from 139 different soviets.
The lack of a soviet-style, centralised body hamstrung the revolution in Spain, even though Spanish workers dealt a far greater blow to state power than the February revolution did, and the Spanish working class went far further in taking over the workplaces and establishing militias. As Russian revolutionary leader, Leon Trotsky, wrote, “The Spanish proletariat stood on the first day of the revolution not below but above the Russian proletariat at the beginning of 1917”.
Although the CNT leaders responded to Franco’s coup attempt with a call for revolution, they offered no concrete way to achieve victory. This was encapsulated in the CNT’s slogan in February, 1936: “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie or libertarian communism”. This contrasts starkly to the slogan of the revolutionary socialist party in Russia, the Bolsheviks, which was “All power to the soviets”. The Bolsheviks recognised that capitalist power could be defeated only by the organised might of the working class. Rejection of all authority, in practice, meant accepting and accommodating to the authority of the capitalist class.
Unfortunately, the anti-collaborationists could never overcome anarchism’s theoretical weakness. Although they were correct to break with the leadership and were moving closer to the need for a centralised state authority, they remained trapped in a syndicalist conception of workers’ power. The Friends of Durruti exemplify this.
In 1938, the Friends released a manifesto called Towards a New Revolution, which began with a scathing critique of the CNT leadership, which had “allowed the revolution to be lost”. It repeated their call for a “revolutionary junta” as “the revolution requires institutions that will safeguard it and, in an organised manner, suppress those hostile elements”. It even recognised this was “a slight modification to anarchism”. In calling for a centralised body to “direct the war” and “safeguard revolutionary order”, the Friends were edging closer to the need for a centralised state apparatus to lead and defend the revolution. But in the same manifesto they could also call for a federation of “free municipalities” because “(s)uch decentralisation would prevent the emergence of a new state apparatus”.
The group had been committed to the idea of a “revolutionary junta” since its foundation. Just weeks before the May Days, the Friends pasted posters over Barcelona that read: “All power to the working class. All economic power to the unions. A Revolutionary Junta instead of the Generalidad”. Once again, these calls were a significant step forward. But in the absence of the strategic clarity to back them up, they remained mere aspirations. How could the unions take all economic power without some sort of body to coordinate it? How could a revolutionary junta seize power without it being a conspiratorial and elitist act of a tiny minority? How could the working class take all power without an institution that allowed it to run society democratically?
Without a soviet-type body, the Friends’ call for “all power to the working class” remained abstract and unable to advance the revolution beyond the fundamental problem it had faced since July: how could the working class actually take power?
What all the anti-collaborationists failed to see is that the basis of workers’ power was in the revolutionary committees. These committees were more than just an embryo of workers’ power; they had exercised control over key parts of society and the economy for months. But no group argued to centralise and unify the committees into a single institution that could challenge the capitalist state.
On this critical question, the anti-Stalinist socialists of the POUM failed too. Although the POUM was always much smaller than the CNT, it became a serious force in Catalonia and the rest of the Republican zone. It led several revolutionary committees in Catalan towns, such as Lerida, where its members established a “People’s Anti-Fascist Committee” that excluded the Popular Front parties. Its members also heroically fought on the barricades alongside anarchist militants at every important moment.
One of the POUM’s key leaders, Andreu Nin, had spent several years in Russia where he served as Leon Trotsky’s secretary and had been part of the Left Opposition opposing Stalin’s counter-revolution. The POUM therefore better understood the need for a workers’ state than other forces. For example, in March, 1937, Nin wrote an article titled “The problem of power”, in which he argued that the “working class cannot limit itself to taking into its own hands the state machine and putting it into operation as it is for its own ends, but must destroy it, creating its own organs”. He also recognised one of the central weaknesses of the revolution was that the working class had “occupied the factories, mines and shops, destroying the economic power of the capitalists; but they did not complete this action with the conquest of political power”. The article finished with the POUM’s call for “a Constituent Assembly of delegates of the factory committees, of the peasants’ organisations and of the combatants at the front, from which would spring the Workers’ and Peasants’ Government”.
But the POUM’s greater theoretical clarity, in the end, served for very little as it constantly tailed the CNT leadership. So when the CNT entered the Generalidad, so too did Nin, serving as minister of justice. Similarly, on the first night of the May Days, the POUM executive met with the CNT leadership and argued to “place ourselves at the head of the movement”. But when the CNT leaders rejected the proposal, the POUM leaders backed down and called for a return to work.
If the experience of the POUM teaches anything, it’s that it’s not enough just to be theoretically correct. A revolutionary party must be willing to roll the dice and put theory into action.
Although the Spanish Revolution ended in defeat, it nevertheless proves that ordinary people can be inspired to fight for a better world and offers a glimpse of what that world could be. But, above all, it proves that, when a revolutionary opportunity arises, having the right politics matters.
