The Leaderless Revolution by Carne Ross

Author:Carne Ross
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2011-04-05T16:00:00+00:00

Though it is rarely mentioned, even in the histories of that period, the Spanish civil war saw a moment, tragically brief, of real existing anarchism. In the area of Spain under Republican control, anarchists for a short while held sway, as far as that term means anything when no one was completely in charge. This was not anarchy, an absence of order, it was a society that for a period decided to govern itself not by centralized authority, but by the wishes of local communities, workers, men and women, led by values of equality and mutual respect.

This happened between 1936 and 1938, and was confined mostly to parts of Catalonia in northern Spain, including Catalonia’s capital, Barcelona. It was estimated that perhaps ten million people participated in this “Spanish Revolution” where farms and factories, and even shops and barbers, were collectivized and run along communal lines—neither owned by the state nor private capital, but run by the peasants and workers themselves. Decisions were made on libertarian principles—by those affected, without bureaucracy. In many areas, agricultural production significantly increased.

By 1938, it was over. The Communist Party in Moscow decided that Spain was not ready for proletarian revolution—at least not this kind—and ordered its cohorts in Spain, the local Communists, to suppress the anarchists. There were mass arrests, street fighting and executions. Anarchist leaders and parties were denounced. This repression was one of the reasons for the ultimate defeat of the Republicans, and the ensuing four decades of fascist dictatorship under Franco.

George Orwell’s memoir of his experience in Catalonia contains vivid depictions of what anarchism, in practice, was really like. When published, Homage to Catalonia was attacked in Britain and elsewhere, above all by Communists and the left in general, who rejected its account of Communist suppression of the anarchists, preferring Moscow’s propaganda that the anarchists were somehow in Franco’s pay or otherwise to blame for the in-fighting in the antifascist ranks.

Homage sold very few copies on initial publication. Even now, the book is rarely seen for what it truly is, and is instead interpreted as a tragic and picturesque account of failed resistance against fascism.19 Orwell had joined a small Marxist-oriented party, POUM,* in order to fight fascism, but later in the book confesses that if he had the choice again, he would have been an anarchist. He describes life in Barcelona during anarchism:

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