anarcho-syndicalism), and it was also strong among the impoverished peasantry in
the south. When a Spanish Communist Party was formed in 1921, the anarchists
were four times more numerous than the socialists. In Spain the mass of workers
and peasants had followed Bakunin when he broke with Marx. The Confederación
Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) had over a million members at the time of the First
World War, and in 1933 the anarchist weekly Tierra y Libertaddeclared grandly:
Workers! Do not vote! The vote is a negation of your personality... All the
politicians are enemies... we need neither state nor government... Do not be
concerned whether the Right or the Left emerge triumphant from this farce...
Parliament... is a filthy house of prostitution... Destroy the ballots! Destroy
the ballot boxes... hack off the heads of the ballot supervisors as well of the
candidates.
(Thomas, 1965: 95)
One could well argue that revolutions do not have to be violent, but this was
not how Spanish anarchists saw the issue. The communists had, following the
Seventh Comintern Congress, thrown their weight behind the idea of a Popular
Front (an alliance of liberal and left-wing forces), and in 1936 the left won a
substantial electoral victory on a programme of radical reform. Franco, with the
army mostly loyal to him, led a rebellion. The socialists (and communists) were
strong in Madrid but the anarchists retained control of Barcelona where all large
industries passed to the CNT, and expropriation was considered the rule. Large
numbers of people belonging to the old order were killed, and churches were
destroyed. In some places, money was replaced by coupons, while in Andalusia in
the south, where the anarchists were also strong, each town acted on its own
responsibility. By 1937 some three million people were living in rural collectives.
The anarchists adopted military methods of organisation, and Miller cites
Borkenau’s comment that in one of the villages of Aragon, the agrarian revolution246 Part 2 Classical ideologies
I had come to Spain with some notion of writing newspaper articles, but I had joined the militia
almost immediately because at that time and in that atmosphere it seemed the only conceivable
thing to do. The Anarchists were still in virtual control of Catalonia and the revolution was in full
swing... it was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the
saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with
red flags or the black and red flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and
sickle and with initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its
images burnt... Every shop and café had an inscription saying it had been collectivised...
Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and
ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared... There were no private motor cars,
they had all been commandeered... And it was the aspect of the crowds that was the queerest
thing of all. In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically
ceased to exist.
(Orwell,2001: 32)Orwell commented that: