Chomsky on Anarchism.pdf - Zine Library

OBJECTIVITY AND LIBERAL SCHOLARSHIP
provide invaluable personal testimony have been consulted, apparently, by
writers of the major historical works.59 The one published collection of documems
dealing with coliectivizationGO has been published only by an anarchist
press and hence is barely accessible to the general reader, and has also rarely
been consulted-it does not, for example, appear in Jackson's bibliography,
though Jackson's accoum is imended to be a social and political, not merely a
military, history. In fact, this astonishing social upheaval seems to have largely
passed from memory. The drama and pathos of the Spanish Civil War have by
no means faded; witness the impact a few years ago of the film To Die in
Madrid. Yet in this film (as Daniel Guerin points out) one finds no reference
to the popular revolution that had transformed much of Spanish society.
I will be concerned here with the events of 1936-1937,61 and with one
particular aspect of (he complex struggle involving Franco Nationalists,
Republicans (including the Communist pany), anarchists, and socialist workers'
groups. The Franco insurrection in July 1936 came against a background
of several months of strikes, expropriations, and banles between peasants and
Civil Guards. The left-wing Socialist leader Largo Caballero had demanded in
June that the workers be armed, but was refused by Azana. When the coup
came, the Republican government was paralyzed. Workers armed themselves
in Madrid and Barcelona, robbing government armories and even ships in the
harbor, and put down the insurrection while the government vacillated, tOrn
44 between the twin dangers of submitting to Franco and arming the working
classes. In large areas of Spain effective authority passed into the hands of the
anarchist and socialist workers who had played a substantial, generally dominant
role in putting down the insurrection.
The next few months have frequently been described as a period of "dual
power." In Barcelona, industry and commerce were largely collectivized, and a
wave of collectivization spread through rural areas, as well as towns and villages,
in Aragon, Castile, and the Levant, and to a lesser but still significant
extent in many parts of Catalonia, Asturias, Estremadura, and Andalusia.
Military power was exercised by defense committees; social and economic
organization rook many forms, following in main outlines the program of the
Saragossa Congress of the anarchist CNT in May 1936. The revolution was
"apolitical," in the sense that its organs of power and administration remained
separate from the central Republican government and, even after several anarchist
leaders entered the government in the autumn of 1936, continued to
fu nction fairly independently until the revolution was finally crushed between
the fascist and Communist-led Republican forces. The success of collectivization
of industry and commerce in Barcelona impressed even highly unsympathetic
observers such as Borkenau. The scale of rural collectivization is indicated
by these data from anarchist sources: in Aragon, 450 collectives with half
a million members; in the Levant, 900 collectives accounting for about half the