Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (93 page)

The leaders of the CNT felt that it had to compromise to obtain foreign aid and to win the war against Franco. But inevitably they were obliged to reinforce the very institutions which they had so vehemently denounced in the past. They checked the collectivization process. They oversaw the transformation of the popular militias into an army. Minister of Justice García Oliver went so far as to tell the students of the new Military School early in 1937: ‘Officers of the Popular Army, you must observe an iron discipline and impose it on your men who, once they are under your command, must cease to be your comrades and be simply cogs in the military machine of our army.’
³⁴
The subsequent regimentation and militarization demoralized many of the anarchist militias and workers.

The anarchist participation in government has been described by Vernon Richards as the unavoidable outcome of the FAI’s original collaboration with the CNT.
³⁵
Others like Emma Goldman tried to excuse it on grounds of expediency in order to unite the republican forces and to defeat fascism. It certainly demonstrated the constant danger which awaited anarcho-syndicalism if it became involved in parliamentary politics. By the middle
of 1937 the greatest anarchist experiment in history was virtually over; it had lasted barely a year.

The Communists increased their influence because the Soviet Union was the sole foreign supplier of arms to the Republican cause, and together with the socialists they began to replace the anarchist committees with municipal government. The militia columns were converted into orthodox brigades with a centralized command structure. On 16 December, 1936,
Pravda
declared; ‘As for Catalunya, the purging of the Trotskyists and Anarcho-syndicalists has begun; it will be conducted with the same energy with which it was conducted in the USSR.’ A Communist-controlled secret police, based on the Cheka model, began a reign of terror. By the end of April 1937 open hostilities were taking place between the members of the Partido Socialista Unificat de Catalunya (PSUC — the combined Socialist and Communist Parties of Catalunya) and the supporters of the CNT who were joined by the dissident Marxist group POUM.

Fighting broke out in Barcelona in early May, when the Communist-controlled police attacked the Telephone Building of Barcelona which was in the hands of the CNT. The street battles which followed left four hundred people dead, including the Italian anarchist intellectual Camillo Berneri. A group calling themselves the Friends of Durruti (who had been shot in the back in mysterious circumstances) criticized the capitulation of the CNT leadership and called for a fresh revolution led by an elected Revolutionary Junta to manage the war and to supervise revolutionary order, propaganda, and international affairs while the unions dealt with the economic affairs with an Economic Council. They argued that ‘the revolution needs organisms to oversee it, and repress, in an organised sense, hostile sectors’.
³⁶

By this stage however they were a voice in the revolutionary wilderness, and the Federación Ibérica de Juventudes Libertarias (FIJL — Iberian Federation of Libertarian Youth) and the Regional Committee of the CNT rejected the call. The government however with the support of the PSUC put down the anarchist resistance. Strict censorship was imposed. It marked the end of anarchist ascendancy in Catalunya. The conflict between the anarchists and Communists was to prove one of the principal causes of the defeat of the republican forces.

Largo Caballero’s government fell directly after the ‘May Days’. It was replaced by Juan Negrin’s government which was even more strongly influenced by the Stalinists; one of its first acts was to declare POUM illegal. It was argued that the war demanded the concentration of the authority of the State. This attitude came to the foremost in the Extended National Economic Plenum of January 1938, the first full gathering of the CNT since the Zaragoza Conference in 1936. It accepted the need for
work inspectors, work norms, and workers’ cards. Censorship of the CNT press was approved to prevent public disagreements. It was even agreed to form an Executive Committee of the CNT, FAI and FIJL.

Soon after the meeting the CNT formed a pact with the UGT, over which the Socialist leader Luis Araquistina said ‘Bakunin and Marx would embrace’. It was however never implemented and at least the Barcelona anarchist weekly
Tierra y Libertad
had the clarity of thought to point out:

At a national congress held in October 1938 attended by delegates from the CNT, the FAI and the FIJL, the secretary-general of the CNT argued that it was the refusal of his comrades to accept militarism from the start which was responsible for the mess they were in. The movement reaffirmed its belief in decentralization and workers’ control but Franco’s victory soon made their realization impossible. Half a million Spaniards went into exile. The anarchist groups formed a Movimiento Libertario Español (Spanish Libertarian Movement) which mulled over what had gone wrong in exile.

The defeat of the anarchist movement in Spain did not result from a failure of anarchist theory and tactics but rather a failure to carry through the social revolution. If the latter had not been sacrificed for the war effort, and the Communists had not seized power, the outcome may well have been very different.

After Franco’s death, the CNT re-emerged in Spain in 1976 as a vigorous force in the trade-union movement, but it is the socialist UGT who now makes the running.
³⁸
The new CNT is still a loose association of
sindicatos
administered by committees, unpaid officers, and dedicated workers. The programme of the 1936 Zaragoza Congress with its commitment to
comunismo libertario
remains its goal. Their numbers are small but their idealism is intact, as old veterans pass on their experience to new generations of workers and students.

For a time, the CNT seemed poised to become a considerable force in the labour movement once again. Unfortunately the movement split, after the Sixth National Congress in 1983, into two factions — the CNT-AIT (Asociación Internacional de Trabajadores) and the CGT (Confederación General de Trabajadores) – one broadly revolutionary, the other more reformist. These wings have been locked in a dispute over who owns the historical assets of the confederation which had been seized by Franco’s State. The CGT has taken on board social ecology, and now calls itself an
anarcho-syndicalist trade union that struggles for a libertarian society, and ‘a future in which neither the person nor the planet is exploited’.

Spanish anarchists were cheered by the appearance of anarchist ideas and tactics briefly during the Portuguese Revolution in the early 1970s.
³⁹
But few believe that revolution is possible in post-Franco Spain, increasingly entrenched as it is in the European Community. As elsewhere in Europe, anarchism finds its chief expression in the campaign for workers’ control and self-management, in the counter-culture, in the peace and green movements and in the anti-capitalist and anti-globalization campaigns.

A
LTHOUGH
R
USSIA
PRODUCED
THREE
of the greatest anarchist thinkers in Bakunin, Kropotkin and Tolstoy, they had remarkably little influence in their own country. The anarchist movement started in Russia late and remained small. Only in the mid 1890s did it really get under way and not until the Russian Revolution did anarchists play a significant part. At the same time, early Russian socialism was remarkably libertarian.

The State in Russia hardly reached many parts of the empire, and was mainly recognizable outside the towns in the form of the soldier, policeman and taxman. It was generally considered an unnecessary and unwelcome burden. Russian peasants moreover had lived for centuries in autonomous communities (
obshchina
), working their land in common and managing their affairs through village councils,
mir.
Disputes were solved through arbiters and juries. They had no need for laws; they arranged their transactions through custom and followed their own consciences.

The Russian revolutionary tradition tended to take an anti-Statist form from the beginning. The great peasant revolts led by Stenka Razin and Pugachev in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were directed against the interference of central authority and sought a decentralized and egalitarian society. In the 1830s Konstantin Aksakov and his fellow Slavophiles were hostile not only to the St Petersburg State but to Statism in general, even though they looked for an ideal autocracy to replace it.

Amongst Russian intellectuals, Alexander Herzen in the 1840s began to spread Proudhon’s ideas in radical circles in Moscow, rejecting both utopian and Jacobin socialism. He looked to the
mir
as the fundamental organism of a transformed Russia. Bakunin’s influence was indirect and desultory in the Russian revolutionary movement, and like Herzen his message reached his homeland chiefly through Russian
emigrés.

The first Russian anarchist organization was formed in Switzerland as a section of Bakunin’s International Brotherhood in the late sixties. It managed to print in 1873 a number of pamphlets in Russian, as well as Bakunin’s
Statism and Anarchy.
Bakunin also collaborated at the time with Nicholas Zhukovsky on the journal
Narodnoe Delo
(People’s Cause), calling for a collectivist and anarchist revolution in order to bring about a voluntary federation of workers’
artels
and peasant
mirs.
But the journal was soon
taken over by the anti-Bakuninist Russian section of the International.

In the 1870s the publications of the Revolutionary Community of Russian Anarchists, set up in Geneva by Zhukovsky and friends in 1873, were the only ones to be widely circulated in Russia. In 1878 they brought out
Obschina
(Community) which rejected constitutional government and insisted that the peasants and workers must emancipate themselves. But their influence remained infinitesimal.

The move towards terrorism in the Russian revolutionary movement reached its apogee in the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881 by the Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will). In the repression which followed, the Russian Social Revolutionary Party emerged to gain considerable support amongst the peasants. It was not until the 1890s that the first openly anarchist groups in Russia appeared and the works of Bakunin and Kropotkin began to be circulated. From his exile, Kropotkin contributed to the anarchist journal
Khleb i Volya.
But at the time of the 1905 Revolution the anarchists groups still remained tiny, completely overshadowed by the Social Revolutionary Party in the country and by the Social Democratic Party in the cities.

The outbreak of the October 1905 Revolution surprised many revolutionaries. It seemed to confirm anarchist tactics of the general strike and their faith in spontaneous revolution. When the revolution failed the Social Democrats were discredited, but the anarchists gained support. During the subsequent years of repression, new groups formed in the larger towns, especially in the Urals and the Ukraine. Anarcho-syndicalism too began to make rapid headway. For the first time in Russian history the anarchists were a force to be reckoned with. Lenin, Trotsky and their supporters were sufficiently concerned to make sure that the Second International in 1907 voted for the exclusion of the followers of Bakunin and Kropotkin.

When the Revolution broke out in February 1917, the anarchists still only formed a small minority on the Left, compared to the Social Revolutionaries and the Social Democrats. The anarchists were divided amongst themselves into syndicalists, anarcho-communists, Tolstoyans and individualists. But when the Revolution broke out, workers and peasants started spontaneously to form soviets, and they seized their chance. Throughout Russia people were calling for the traditional libertarian demands of Russian populism: land and liberty, bread and justice for all, with production organized through industrial and agricultural collectives.

Few anarchist organizations existed in Russia at the time, but in Moscow at least there was a small federation of anarchist groups. The writer V. M. Eikhenbaum, better-known as Volin, returned from America and joined the Union for Anarcho-Syndicalist Propaganda in St Petersburg and helped edit its daily paper
Golos Truda
(The Voice of Labour), which
became the most influential of its type. His
nom de guerre
Volin was formed from the Russian
volia
meaning ‘freedom’.
¹
He was involved in setting up one of the first Soviets. Trotsky later wrote without irony: ‘The activity of the soviet represented the organization of anarchy. Its existence and its subsequent development the consolidation of anarchy.’
²
Towards the end of 1918 a Confederation of Anarchist Organizations called
Nabat
(Alarm) was formed in Kharkov, also with the help of Volin; it offered a social model of ‘communist anarchism’ different from those of both the Whites and the Reds. Needless to say, both tried to ban it.