This year marks the 90th anniversary of the onset of the civil war and revolution in Spain. In this essay I suggest that the efforts of the Spanish working class in that epic conflict provide elements for building a model of socialism based on direct working-class control and participatory, democratic planning of a socialized economy. With statist and managerialist conceptions of socialism widespread today, I think it is especially important for us to  revive the focus on worker-centered socialism based on coordinated worker self-management of production.

In the Spanish revolution of the 1930s, the key force in building towards socialism was the National Confederation of Labor (CNT) union — growing to 2.5 million members in the course of the revolutionary struggle. Although the CNT had a Leninist faction in the 1920s and early ‘30s, their expulsion left the various anarchist tendencies as the key internal influence by 1936-37. 

The CNT unions gave Spanish anarchists a way to connect their radical ideas to the concerns and grievances of working-class people. Although anarchist worker-intellectuals believed the CNT must have a program that relates to “materialist reality,” social anarchist theory had a more flexible notion of oppression than Marxism of that era. Anarchists saw various structures of oppression in society such as the oppression of women and the way the state was not merely “superstructural” to capitalist economy but was a source of oppression itself. The CNT was central to a social movement that extended outward to the networks of anarchist groups and the publishing efforts of worker-intellectuals, the network of storefront worker schools, and organizing initiatives like the women’s liberation organization Mujeres Libres. In Barcelona the worker schools or Ateneos were independent dues-based organizations with an administrative committee elected at an annual assembly. The centers provided cultural events, study groups, and classes on public speaking. The anarchist movement operated with a concept of capacitación — building the capacity to act as an active participant in the movement. The Mujeres Libres organization used the storefront centers to build the confidence and organizing skills of women. Mujeres Libres emerged out of a women’s caucus in the CNT in Catalonia and grew to about 20,000 working class women. Their goal was to emancipate women from their dual oppression, as women and as workers.

The working-class seizure of the economy and construction of a “proletarian army” controlled by the CNT emerged in reaction to the attempt of the fascist generals to seize state power with the backing of the Castilian Catholic church and several political organizations with fascist politics.

For those of us interested in developing a model for how self-managed eco-socialism can be constructed, the impressive accomplishments of the Spanish working class of that era has a number of important lessons. 

For CNT militants, socialization had two phases. First, all the workplaces in an industry would be grouped together into an industrial federation which would be responsible for over-all coordination and management of that industry. The actual takeovers of workplaces came from the union’s rank-and-file leadership — shop stewards (delegados de taller), union secretaries, and worker militia groups. According to some estimates, 80 percent of the economy of Catalonia and 70 percent of the economy of Valencia were expropriated by the unions. In a typical scenario, the shop stewards council became the administrative council. 

The second phase to socialization would be uniting these industry federations into a society-wide federation. These would be coordinated through national and regional meetings of delegates which advocates called “economic councils.” Joan Ferrer was the secretary of the Commercial Workers Union in Barcelona. In an interview for Ron Fraser’s Blood of Spain, this is how he described socialization:

It was our idea in the CNT that everything should start from the worker, not — as with the Communists — that everything should be run by the state. To this end we wanted to set up industrial federations — textiles, metal-working, department stores, etc. — which would be represented on an overall Economics Council which would direct the economy. Everything, including economic planning, would thus remain in the hands of the workers. (p 220)

The drive to socialize an industry — and thus achieve coordinated worker control over the industries they work in — had several sources in the CNT movement of the 1920s-30s. First, the project of taking over the workplaces had been discussed for decades in CNT circles and at congresses. This was viewed as a necessary initial action in a revolutionary situation. But the inter-war years brought a new emphasis on society-wide economic coordination and democratic economic planning.

A number of influential worker-intellectuals in the CNT drew lessons from the Russian revolution and examining the current efforts at economic planning such as Stalin’s Five-Year Plans and Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration. They were reacting to these developments by trying to work out a form of participatory, democratic planning that would be consistent with libertarian socialist principles. This effort includes writers like Joan Peiró, Diego Abad de Santillan, Higinio Noja Ruiz and Gaston Leval. 

But I believe a more important influence on the socialization campaign was the CNT’s adoption of coordinated national industrial unions in the 1930s. Here we need to look at how the CNT was organized. The CNT was a class union. Direction for the CNT movement was developed through regional and national congresses or conferences that brought together delegates from all sectors. The basic units were the workplace “sections” run by member assemblies and a council of elected shop stewards (delegados de taller). The delegados were the organic worker leadership who kept the union in sync with the workers in the shop. The various shops in a local industry were united into a local industrial union. There was an elected committee of union secretaries (typically unpaid) for various tasks — such as support for imprisoned members and coordinating with local social movements. The local unions in a city or area were united into a local federation — a “one big union” — to facilitate class-wide mobilizations as in general strikes.

Although CNT had adopted industrial unionism for its local unions in 1919, anarchist fear of bureaucratic control was an initial speed bump against the formation of national industrial unions. Finally in 1931 the CNT approved national industrial federations where action and program could be coordinated through conventions and a national industry union committee. Joan Peiró emphasized the way these national industrial unions were prefigurative of coordinated worker self-management of an entire industry.

For the worker-intellectuals and militants of the CNT, social transformation required the organization and education of the working class, development of its skills and self-confidence, and working out a coherent revolutionary strategy — not a reliance on pure “spontaneity.” Self-taught worker theorist Joan Peiró, in his 1933 book Sindicalismo, put it this way: 

For us the social revolution is not just a matter of rising violently against the organized forces of the state…[it] consists in taking over factories and mines, the land and the railways. It is not sufficient to take over social wealth, it is necessary to know how to use it — and to use it immediately, without any discontinuity.”

“Continuity” would be assured because the workers themselves, who have the skills to continue the running of industry, would carry out the transformation.

The need to take control of the workplaces as an initial step in a revolution had been discussed by union militants in Spain for decades. Thus the defeat of the army takeover attempt in Barcelona in July, 1936 sparked a mass movement of seizure of workplaces by the CNT unions. Often the shop stewards council converted itself into an administrative council with revocable delegates answerable to the workplace assembly. In many industries a technical advisory committee was eventually organized with engineers or others with special expertise. 

In those industries where the CNT had organized a national federation of industry the national industrial union provided a framework to develop a coordinated takeover and planning for an entire industry. We can see this in the case of the telephone, furniture manufacturing, and entertainment industries. 

The CNT’s national industrial federation of telephone workers (FNITT) seized the assets of the Spanish National Telephone Company and ran the telephone system. The CNT wood workers federation seized the logging operations and sawmills in the Pyrenees mountains, furniture retail stores, large furniture factories and mom-and-pop cabinet making shops in Barcelona and Valencia. The CNT union shut down the small cabinet-making shops, where conditions were often cramped, inefficient and dangerous. These shops were replaced by a new factory in Barcelona, the Double X. The union imported French machinery with the latest safety devices. The union managed the entire industry from extracting the raw material to sale of the finished product in showrooms. 

An anarchist group in the wood union opposed the drive to consolidate the entire industry into a single union-managed industrial operation. They advocated the creation of small, autonomous production centers. Their critics described this as a throwback to the pre-capitalist era of self-employed artisans. Even so it could be argued that cabinet-making centers could be a way to develop design and wood-working skill in apprentices. But the anarchist proposal was defeated. 

The union believed it should look after the overall well-being of its members. To this end, the union built a gym with an Olympic-size swimming pool at the Double X factory. In a mountain valley the union set up an agricultural operation to grow food for the families of union members. As a wood union member recalled: “The concept that prevailed was that the working class should have good furniture at cheap prices” (quoted in Ron Fraser, Blood of Spain p. 221).

The entertainment industry was another example of socialization by an industrial union. The CNT entertainment workers union (SIE) seized the entire industry — local movie houses, movie production, the Grand Opera, live theater. Often small hole-in-the-wall vaudevilles were shut down and assets concentrated in new facilities — such as a new movie palace in Barcelona. SIE ran the gamut from actors and filmmakers to film technicians, opera singers, and the ushers and cashiers at venues. 

The CNT film production group (SIE Films) produced a stream of newsreels and documentaries to support the revolution and the anti-fascist war effort as well as a number of theatrical films. The union-run movie houses ran Hollywood films mixed with their political newsreels and documentaries. The CNT’s control of the entertainment industry supported its politics through popular education. Thus, the CNT control of cinemas and movie production was seen as a major threat by the communists. In 1938 the communist-controlled police attempted to nationalize this industry — provoking a strike by the workers.

In the railway, maritime transport and electric power industries the workforce was about evenly divided between the CNT and the General Workers Union (UGT). The UGT was a more bureaucratic union created by the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) in 1888. While the Moscow-line PSUC (Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia) had gained control of the union apparatus in Catalonia, there was also a struggle for control in various regions between the timid social-democrats and the more radical democratic Marxist wing of the PSOE. 

Despite the internal division in the workforce the CNT national industrial unions on the railways and the power system pushed for socialization of their industries. The Madrid-Zaragoza-Alicante (MZA) was a large, privately owned railway that operated the mainlines from Madrid to Barcelona and Valencia, and the mainline along the Mediterranean coast. On July 20th, with street-fighting still going on in Barcelona, militants from the CNT railway industrial union told the management of the MZA they were fired. The workers were taking over. The electric commuter railway operating out of Barcelona was also seized. 

The CNT union initiated this takeover but the UGT members soon came along and a joint CNT-UGT organization took over — the Revolutionary Railway Federation. This was coordinated by a 12-person “Revolutionary Committee” and a full-time executive director. Assemblies of the rank and file were held every two weeks in the railway terminals. The delegates gave reports, and could be removed by the assemblies. As women were by far the lowest paid workers on the railway system, they benefitted the most from the federation’s decision to equalize the wage rate for all workers. (But they had to agree to an exception when they hired civil engineers who were paid about two thirds more per month than other workers.)

The transport unions initiated a survey to examine efficiency in the transport sector. The coastal freight industry had a lot of duplication among motor freight, railway and coastal shipping firms. Worker militants viewed this as an inefficiency. The unions agreed to eliminate the competing coastal shipping line and create new truck and bus services for unserved rural areas. This is a good example of how the CNT militants were working towards overall economic coordination and participatory planning. 

The electric power industry was re-organized in a similar way with the utility federation headed by an eight-person workers council with equal number of delegates elected by CNT and UGT members. There were also “building committees” elected in the various facilities. During the civil war the worker-controlled power federation installed a number of new hydro power generators in the Pyrenees mountains such as a 50,000 kw generating station at Flix, built by a team of 700 workers. (Gaston Leval, Collectives in the Spanish Revolution, pp. 253-257 and 242-244.)

In some cases a new national industry union was created in the revolutionary process. Anarchist ideology had a long history of supporting reason and science and there were quite a few anarchist doctors in Spain. In 1936 a group of anarchist physicians in Catalonia initiated a new health workers industrial union. This union then expanded into a 40,000-member national health workers federation throughout the anti-fascist territory. The union managed hospitals and ran a new socialized health care system. The various professions (nurses, doctors, pharmacists) were organized as “sections” of the health union. The health union ran dental clinics and took over research and manufacture of pharmaceuticals. In the first year the health workers federation created six new hospitals. Homes of the rich were often converted into free clinics.

Before July, a senior physician would typically own a medical practice and hired younger doctors as assistants. Medical services were focused on wealthier neighborhoods. Poor villages often had no doctor. The new system tried to distribute resources more equitably. If a poor village didn’t have a doctor, the health union would find one. 

The health union tried to do away with private practices but was not able to get the majority of doctors to agree to this. All of the doctors were required to work three hours a day for the health union, which left them time enough to see private patients. When working for the union-run health care system, all doctors were paid the same pay rate — but this was quite a bit higher than a typical manual worker’s wage. 

Funding came partly from the government and partly from the worker organizations that had taken over management of the various industries. Although visits to the new network of outpatient clinics were free, the health union charged fees for office visits to doctors and for surgery. As a result, many unions, collectivized industries and village collectives entered into special agreements with the health union to provide free health care for their members and their families. 

Not all unions in the CNT had organized into national industrial federations by July of 1936. Thus many individual workplaces were being run as a stand-alone venture. In the textile industry, for example, the various textile mills competed for markets and resources. This situation of competing ventures was criticized by some leading anarchist militants as a form of “people’s capitalism.” 

This situation is part of the background to the struggle between the CNT and the PSUC over a proposed “collectivization” law. In August, 1936 the CNT in Catalonia decided to join an “Economics Council” created by the government of the Generalitat — the autonomous regional state in Catalonia. The PSUC tried to curtail the CNT’s seizure of enterprises and its drive to construct a coordinated, socialized economy under union control. The PSUC’s goal was statist nationalization of the economy. With support from Andres Nin (representing the Workers Party of Marxist Unification — POUM), the CNT was able to force the government to pass a decree legalizing the expropriations of enterprises.

The economy of Catalonia faced many challenges — a brain drain as many educated professionals fled the country, international trade flows were disrupted, and industry lost a large part of its market due to fascist seizure of a third of the country. Although many enterprises decided on shorter hours rather than layoffs, the industries of Catalonia faced a major economic crisis. The CNT joined the Economics Council to use the state to assist in this situation. De Santillan and other advocates of social planning expected that a successful Spanish revolution would be subject to embargo by major capitalist powers. For this reason their writings investigated ways to make the Iberian economy more self-sufficient. 

Nonetheless, the anarchist representatives on this Council clashed repeatedly with representatives of the ERC (Left Republican Party of Catalonia) and PSUC over worker control of economic planning and control of industries. ERC was a Catalan nationalist party with a base among the professional and small business layers who generally opposed the expropriations of firms.

In a situation where many ventures taken in hand by the workers were not part of a national industry federation, the decree legalizing the expropriations required their conversion into stand-alone cooperatives, called “collectives.” In the wake of the collectivization decree, the CNT unions held a conference in Barcelona to work out a general solution for the expropriated workplaces. How far could the CNT proceed towards socialization? What should the CNT do with the expropriated firms? In many cases, unions managed expropriated facilities.

“Up to that moment,” recalled Joan Ferrer (in his interview for Blood of Spain, p. 212), “I had never heard of collectivization as a solution for industry — the department stores were being run by the union. What the new system meant was that each collectivized firm would retain its individual character, but with the ultimate objective of federating all enterprises within the same industry.” 

At that conference, the more powerful unions — such as transportation, public utilities, woodworkers, and entertainment — had already proceeded to the first phase of socialization, consolidating an entire industry into an industrial federation. These unions wanted to continue on this path. The smaller, weaker unions felt they had no choice but to convert the expropriated enterprises into cooperatives.

Here we can see a motivation for the socialization campaign that got underway in late 1936 among CNT militants. Merging the various facilities in an industry under a national industry federation would help to solve problems of particular ventures but would also build power to oppose the communists. 

The May 1936 CNT “libertarian communist” program proposed a role in economic planning for assemblies and committees of neighborhood or village residents — called “free municipalities.” These bodies could have roles in food distribution, housing and environmental protection. In practice many neighborhood committees were created in the revolutionary process.

According to Diego Abad de Santillan (in El organismo económico de la revolución) the society-wide worker congresses would ensure social accountability of industry federations. But I think there needs to be accountability to residents in communities. Thus, assembly-based community governance could also help to keep industries accountable to the population, with powers to request products or ban pollutants. 

An important factor in the defeat of the army takeover in Barcelona in July, 1936 was the CNT’s self-defense organization. This consisted of clandestine six-person armed cells, coordinated by the union’s regional defense committee (described by Agustin Guillamón in Ready for Revolution). To defeat the army in the two-day battle on July 19-20, the CNT committed about two thousand armed workers. The CNT defense organization then built a union militia, using weapons captured from the army.

Various CNT armed columns were organized with an internally democratic structure. The units might hold assemblies and elect a delegate to the column’s “war committee.” The whole column elected the “chief delegate” — the commanding officer. Sympathetic personnel from the army were taken on as technical advisors. Over a period of some weeks, the CNT built a “proletarian army” with about about 100,000 members. The operation of this army was coordinated by the CNT’s National Defense Committee.

The CNT unions also seized more than 200 metal-working and chemical plants in the Barcelona area to convert to the manufacture of weapons and supplies for the union’s army. The CNT metal workers seized the Hispano-Suiza auto factory in and converted it to the manufacture of armored cars. The Hispano-Suiza plant had previously manufactured luxury automobiles in the same class as the Rolls Royce.

The idea of mass unions building a revolutionary army for defense of a revolution was not new to syndicalist thinking. The 1922 principles of the International Workers Association (the labor international to which the CNT was affiliated) said that “the defense of the revolution must be entrusted to the masses and their economic organizations.” Thus the unions must control the dominant armed power in a revolutionary situation through their worker militia. In early 1936 activists with the CNT defense organization had already called for the building of a “proletarian army.” Thus the dominant armed power must not be a conventional army run by the state.

But what about governance of the whole society? Building new structures for the over-all governance of the society is as important as building structures of worker self-management of the industries. The need for worker power to take on a society-wide dimension of political control follows logically from the revolutionary syndicalist aim of working-class liberation.  From a libertarian socialist point of view, the aim should be to socialize political power. To the extent that power is rooted in the participatory democracy of the workplace and neighborhood assemblies, the power is not concentrated in some elite of party apparatchiks and state managers. 

If the CNT could not come up with a practical program for a unified working-class political power, this would mean that the only alternative would be a top-down unity of leaders of the Popular Front parties through a rebuilt Republican state. No other option was realistic.

With the drive for rebuilding the Republican state, the communists and other Popular Front parties were pushing to rebuild top-down army and police forces. This was a direct threat to the working-class power developed by the CNT movement. 

This led to a push by a radical anarcho-syndicalist faction in the union to replace the central Republican government with a Defense Council controlled by the CNT and UGT — to run a unified People’s Militia with a unified command. The Council would consist of seven CNT delegates and seven UGT delegates. The pro-capitalist Republican parties would be excluded. This was the alternative to the communist plan. This Defense Council would seize all the banks and mandate worker self-management of all industries but its role would be largely limited to social self-defense — courts, police, military, prisons. Workers would self-manage all the industries.

To try to get the UGT to go along with this, the CNT carried out a series of negotiations with Largo Caballero. By early September, 1936, Largo Caballero had been appointed prime minister of Spain, representing the PSOE. If they could have gotten his agreement to an alliance, his support would have added legitimacy to the drive for direct working-class political power. This was essentially an attempt to negotiate with the head of the section of the working-class movement that supported an electoral socialist strategy. 

Marcel Rosenberg (the Soviet ambassador) warned Largo Caballero that the CNT proposal would destroy the “international legitimacy” of the Spanish Republic. Manuel Azaña, President of the Republic, threatened to resign. Largo Caballero vetoed the CNT proposal. He saw no reason to give the CNT the kind of power they were asking for.

During the negotiations with the UGT for a National Defense Council, Eduardo de Guzmán was editor of the daily CNT paper Castilla Libre in Madrid. In his view, the initiative to form a working-class government in Madrid was hindered by the CNT’s failure to take power in Barcelona. Even if the complete implementation of “libertarian communism” was not possible at the 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. If the CNT had done so in Catalonia, it would have helped…our minority position in Madrid. But they believed that it was sufficient to have taken the streets, to have seized arms. They completely overlooked the importance of the state apparatus. (From an interview for Blood of Spain, pp. 335–336.)

According to de Guzmán, “the petty bourgeoisie was inevitably opposed to the proletariat. The Communists were recruiting in this class, and in alliance with the petty bourgeois Republicans were bound to gain strength if the Generalitat and the central government were reconstituted.” He believed that the CNT should have pushed for a working-class government at the very beginning when there was no effective government in Madrid at all. “A revolutionary moment of great promise had been lost,” in his opinion.

This proposal for a union governing council — a kind of worker’s government — would enable the unions to control the dominant armed force in society. In this way they could prevent the army and police from seizing the worker-managed industries. Abel Paz’s biography of Buenaventura Durruti has a quote from a letter in which he proposes a strategy to force Largo Caballero’s hand. He suggests that the union should directly take power in the regions of Catalonia and Valencia where it was the majority union and had the armed capacity to take over. The idea was to get Largo Caballero to agree to the union governing council proposal, and to use the country’s gold reserves to provide funds for the worker-controlled war industry.

With the rebuilding of Republican state authority, a new national police force and conventional army, the threat of state takeover of industries became real. In Revolution and the State Danny Evans describes the way anarchist militants by early 1937 had come to see the rebuilding of the Republican state as the “counter-revolution.” From April, 1937 on the communist-controlled police were used to seize and nationalize certain industries — such as the arms industry and the telephone system.

According to CNT journalist Jaime Balius, the mass general strike in Barcelona in May, 1937 showed:

the proletariat’s unshakeable determination to place a workers’ leadership in charge of the armed struggle, the economy and the entire existence of the country. Which is to say (for any anarchist not afraid of the words) that the proletariat was fighting for the taking of power which would have come to pass through the destruction of the old bourgeois instruments and erection in their place of a new structure…that surfaced in July [1936]. (Quoted by Agustin Guillamón in The Friends of Durruti Group.)

At a meeting of the CNT delegates of the Barcelona local labor federation the night before a regional plenary in July, 1936, Garcia Oliver argued that “the (CNT) movement should take power.” In an oral history interview in the ‘70s, Garcia Oliver said this position derives from revolutionary syndicalism. The working class can’t end its subordination to a dominating, exploiting class without generalizing social power to the over-all society-wide (political) level, where the decisions are made about the making and enforcing of the society’s basic rules. In Towards a New Revolution Balius describes a concrete proposal to replace the Generalitat state with a Revolutionary Defense Council — with delegates elected directly from the workplace or union assemblies. With nearly half the union workers in Catalonia organized into the UGT, such a council would have been a united front of the two unions. 

This idea of governance by a united front of democratic working-class mass organizations poses a democratic alternative to the communist idea of the seizure of state power by a Marxist party.

We can imagine an arrangement where governance includes both neighborhood assembly-based community governance and broader congresses of community delegates combined with industries controlled by industrial federations and society-wide worker congresses. This mix of institutions could provide a basis for a distributed, participatory and democratic form of social planning and social governance. The Spanish revolution of the 1930s provides historical backup for this program.Email