Sharkey Paul - Anarchism and Workers Self-Management in Revolutionary Spain

Frank Mintzs classic study of the Spanish revolutionary collectivesnow revised and available here in English for the first timeis a penetrating analysis of the most extensive and deeply rooted experiment in workers self-management since the advent of capitalism. It is also a book with a mission. If E. P. Thompsons famous motivation was to rescue the history of the British working class from the condescension of posterity, Mintz was inspired by a far more overarching objective: to penetrate the wall of silence erected around Spains revolution of 1936. Spains revolutionary experience, the great beacon of hope in the prevailing darkness of what Victor Serge dubbed the midnight of last century, was devoured by a civil war that was almost immediately eclipsed by the horrors and Holocaust of World War II. As the first chill winds of the Cold War scattered dust and fog across the rubble of post-war Europe, from Madrid to Moscow, the grand narratives of the victors versions of historybe it Stalinist, liberal-left or Francoistall ensured that the Spanish revolution became shrouded in silence, or, at a minimum, distorted beyond recognition.

For decades, the historiography of 1930s Spain confirmed the maxim that the history of failed revolutions tends to be ignored. During the long winter of Francoist dictatorship, the apologists of the regime imposed an official bi-polarity on the history of the 1930s, constructing a division between the forces of good and evil, of Spain and Anti-Spain. Prominent here was policeman-Historian Eduardo Comn Colomer, who used police archives as the basis of his calumnies against the anarchists, who were depicted as having imposed themselves on an otherwise law-abiding working class. Yet the exigencies of the Cold War, so adroitly exploited by the dictatorship for its self-preservation, led to an even greater distortion: in its readiness to highlight the red menace, Francoist historiography downplayed the role of revolutionary anarchist masses in the 1930s, prioritising instead organised Stalinism, a force that, prior to the civil war, was largely insignificant on the Spanish left. Thus, the red-and-black that heavily inflected the collectivisations was recast as a red revolution, a legend that was extremely flattering for the official communist movement.

Perforce, Stalinist interpretations downplayed the role of the anarchists in the Spanish revolution. The internal culture of the Spanish communist party hinged on the axiom that it was the party of revolution, so it was historically absurd to conceive of a revolution occurring outside of its control. Yet the bureaucratic camarilla at the head of the socialist motherland had no desire to see a revolution in Spain in 1936. By 1934, with the triumph of fascism in Italy, Germany and Austria, the Soviet leadership felt internationally isolated and threatened by right-wing dictatorships. Stalins foreign policy, therefore, became committed to the objective of forging an international alliance between the Soviet Union and the liberal democracies, especially Britain and France. To this end, Stalin, via the Communist International, instructed the various national communist parties to shelve any revolutionary ambitions in order to form Popular Front alliances with those democratic parties prepared to resist fascism.

Given all this, the Spanish revolution of 1936 presented Stalin with a grave dilemma: not only was it beyond his control, it also carried the danger of driving the western democracies into an alliance with Italo-German fascism. The Spanish communist movement therefore recast the issues at stake in the civil war: far from being a revolutionary war, the Stalinists defined the conflict as an armed clash between democracy, in the form of the Republic, and fascism, in the guise of General Franco and his Italian and German allies. The nature of the Spanish revolution was now also deformed beyond recognition. Rather than a social revolution, this was instead a new phase in Spains democratic revolution, thus, the official party history of the civil war defines the Spanish revolution as a popular, democratic, anti-Fascist movement, the principal aim of which was to defend the Republic, freedom and national sovereignty against the Fascist rebellion. Social revolution, in the eyes of the Stalinists, was dangerously premature: it would break the anti-fascist unity between the working and middle classes that they claimed was crucial to winning the war and, moreover, alienate the western democracies from supporting the anti-fascist struggle against Franco, Hitler and Mussolini. (Of course, when it came to confronting the social revolution, the Stalinists had no qualms about breaking anti-fascist unity, while the western democratic governments, principally that of Britain, wanted Franco to win the war come what may.)

In a very real sense, therefore, Francoist and Stalinist versions of history fed into one another, their shared set of assumptions serving to inflate the role of the communist movement and distorting, or simply ignoring, the history of the revolution. Curiously, the same was also true of much liberal historiography, which tended to advance the Manichean vision of the civil war as a conflict of democracy versus fascism, as little more than a prelude or a warm-up to the global conflict between democracy and fascism during World War Two. Again, such a reading of the civil war left little or no room whatsoever for the Spanish revolution.

The 1960s saw the first attacks on the unlikely bedfellows that preserved a conspiracy of silence about the Spanish revolution. In the Anglo-Saxon world, liberal historiography received a major blow with the publication of Noam Chomskys celebrated essay Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship in 1969, in which he criticised those historians marked by their antipathy towards the forces of popular revolution in Spain, or their goals.

By foregrounding the role of revolutionary collectives, this book was at loggerheads with the Francoist-Stalinist-Liberal, an important work that recuperated the experience of the struggle of thousands of anonymous workers for social and economic justice. It is concerned with questions such as why did self-management assume the proportions it took in Spain? How did it develop? Who organised the collectives? Were they spontaneous or forced? What motivated the collectivisers? What were their consequences and achievements? If compared with other attempts at collectivisation, did the Spanish case possess any unique characteristics?