Will Spain Turn to Its History of Anarchy in Economic Crisis?

Tens of thousands of people marched in 56 Spanish cities at the beginning of October to protest austerity cuts imposed from the European north through the ECB. The country has been rocked by an unemployment rate around 30%. The youth unemployment rate is around 50%. 20,000 people marched in Madrid alone behind a banner that read: “They want to ruin the country. We have to stop them.” The rally in Spain’s capital was supported by 150 organizations.

“They are abusing the lower social classes,” 54-year-old teacher Luis Diaz said. “By backing banks, they are torturing the working class and badly affecting public education, health care and pensions when what they should be doing is exactly the opposite.”

Spain is the eurozone’s fourth largest economy, and its entrenched political system is compromised by Spain’s inability after Franco’s fascist rule to grieve and learn from the collective trauma. The bureaucratic habits of the nation were etched into it by the oligarch’s behind Franco, and its current politicians scantily have worked outside of the public sector. And so, they are by conditioning basically communists: government is daily life.

With the fabric of Spanish life ripped apart at the seams, one has to call in question the likelihood of history rhyming. With the European Union in the process of consolidating the entire political and economic fabric of once diverse Europe, it is unlikely Spain would have enough say in its internal affairs to call for a Civil War, but there will be factioning and perhaps violence.

What sorts of sects can be expected to form? Spain indeed has a long history of anarchist movements, spanning back to the nineteenth century. It is possible, if Mark Twain’s words are to be believed, that Spain will once again be the breeding ground of a gaining anarchist movement.

And so, will a Spanish history of Anarchy movements be reignited in the coming years and decades? What would that mean?

Spanish Civil War

Fascists in Spain employed brutal means during the Spanish Civil War so as to establish a tyrannical dictatorship. But, the Spanish Communists were no different, except for in their failure to establish a regime just as total as the fascists. Often overlooked, however, is the bloody offenses and tyrannical visions of the most powerful sect of the Spanish Republicans: The Anarchist movement.

In July 1936, officers throughout Spain attempted a coup d’ etat against the established Republican government. In Catolina, Aragon, and other areas, anarchist militants defeated the military uprisings. The anarchists proved to be more powerful than many regional governments, and potentially the central government. Experiencing this, Spanish Anarchists implemented some radical changes in the regions of Spain where they had the broadest popular support.

The Spanish Anarchists embarked upon mass murders of people suspected of supporting the Nationalists. In many cases, those killed had not taken action to assist the Nationalist Rebellion. They were murdered for their beliefs, and surely in many cases, what others falsely thought to be their beliefs.

As historian Bolloten explains:

“The courts of law were supplanted by revolutionary tribunals, which dispensed justice in their own way. ‘Everybody created his own justice and administered it himself,’ declared Juan Garcia Oliver, a leading Anarchist who became minister of justice in November 1936. ‘Some used to call this “taking a person for a ride,” [paseo] but I maintain that it was justice administered directly by the people in the complete absence of regular judicial bodies.’”[7] This distinction no doubt escaped the thousands of people who were murdered because they happened to have political or religious beliefs that the Anarchists did not agree with. “‘We do not wish to deny,’ avowed Diego Abad de Santillan, a prominent Anarchist in the region of Catalonia, ‘that the nineteenth of July brought with it an overflowing of passions and abuses, a natural phenomenon of the transfer of power from the hands of privileged to the hands of the people. It is possible that our victory resulted in the death by violence of four or five thousand inhabitants of Catalonia who were listed as rightists and were linked to political or ecclesiastical reaction.’”[8] De Santillan’s comment typifies the Spanish Anarchists’ attitude toward his movement’s act of murder of several thousand people for their political views: it is a mere “natural phenomenon,” nothing to feel guilty over.

Spanish Anarchists also persecuted people for their religious beliefs, much like the Communists. Theism, most often in Spain of a Catholic variation, led to much violence by Anarchist militants. Anarchists burnt religious buildings, including cathedrals and churches to convents and monasteries was commonplace. Priests and nuns were murdered. In the regions where Anarcho-statists in Spain had control, churches and convents were burned in the hundred or were used for secular purposes.

“Catholic dens no longer exist,” declared the Anarchosyndicalist organ,Solidaridad Obrera. “The torches of the people have reduced them to ashes.”

Apologists for the Spanish Anarchist movement during the Civil War maintain that the previously mentioned atrocities were committed by rogue elements of the Anarchist movement, and was not the party-line of the Anarcho-state leadership.

One analyst finds something different:

“A common distinction between the Red and White terrors in Spain that has sometimes been made by partisans of the left is that the former was disorganized and spontaneous, while the latter was centralized and systematic, continuing throughout the war and long afterward. This distinction is at best only partially accurate. In the early months the Nationalist repression was not at all centrally organized, whereas that in the Popular Front zone had more planning and organization than it is given credit for. This is indicated by the many executions in areas where social conflict was not particularly intense, and by the fact that many of the killings were done by revolutionary militia coming in from other districts. Nor did the political executions in the Republican zone end after the close of 1936, though they did diminish in volume.”

Whether or not the Anarcho-statists of Civil War Spain were organized or not is not the central issue. Rather, the central issue lie in the unfortunate ideology of the movement which created such a strong notion of the “other” that it led to offensive force.

The Spanish Anarchists had an agenda very similar to Communists in Spain and other countries in the last century; that is, they wished to crush the enemies of the working classes by any means. All options were on the table, just as the Communists and Fascists. As one anarchist put it:

“We hated the bourgeoisie, they treated us like animals. They were our worst enemies. When we looked at them we thought we were looking at the devil himself. And they thought the same of us.”

The Anarchists were very eager to establish an Anarcho-government in Catalonia, a region in which they could overpower the regional Catalonian government, the Generalitat. Rather than officially take over the mechanisms of the Catalonian government, the Spanish Anarchists chose to retain the Generalitat as a legal cover. Real power was held in the hands of the Anarchist-controlled Cenral Anti-Fascist Militia Committee.

An anarcho-state in Catalonia meant the creation of militia units for the front, a reorganization from the top of the economy, and legislative and judicial action, cementing for the historiography the emphasis on the state the anarcho-statists had. The states set up by anarchist-run councils were without doubt modern states, meddling in a totalitarian menu of affairs such as the economy, education, propaganda, transportation, and virtually everything else.

Quite quickly, the anarchist leadership led a very discombobulated group. While some in the anarchist leadership called for an end to militant fighting, their orders were not followed. Many groups were continuing their militancy, such as a small Trotskyist group of Bolshevik Leninists as well as the dissident anarchists.

A time of struggle resulted in the reinforcements by central government firmly placing the power into the hands of the Generalitat. The power of the Communists was enhanced greatly by the concessions at the regional and national levels. The new central government put Juan Negrin in the position of Prime Minister. As a Communist plant, Negrin assured Anarchists lost all their positions in central government.

Not only during the Spanish Civil War has “Anarchism” played a role in Spanish life. The oft disparate philosophies under the umbrella of Spanish Anarchism have gained perhaps more support and influence in Spain than anywhere else, especially before Francisco Franco’s victory in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939. Franco had thousands of anarchists executed.

In the period leading up to the Spanish Civil War, there were many variants of anarchism in Spain: Expropriative anarchism, peasant anarchism in the countryside of Andalusia, urban anarcho-syndicalism in Catolonia, particulary in Barcelona, as well as what is referred to by some as “pure” anarchism in cities like Zaragoza. To be sure, these different forms of anarchism in Spain leading up to the Civil War had a great deal in common, and were effectively anarcho-statist philosophically. Hence the violence…

Into the second half of the 20th century, the violence began to fade within the movement and was abetted by the creation of a libertarian trade union. That is, after all, what happens with the institutionalization of any movement: a softening of the edges.

And so, general strikes became common as large portions of the Spanish working class adopted anarchist ideas, although the overall thought remained rooted in statism and took on the form of a variant of communism.

The Road to Anarchy in Spain

At the middle of the 19th century, revolutionary ideas were foreign to Spain. The most radical movement in Spain was a federalist movement. Just as now in Spain and the rest of the world, an unfocused worldview led to anti-clericalism and distrust of government. Peasant unrest in the country during this period rarely associated itself with any political movement.

The earliest successful attempt to introduce anarchism to the Spanish masses was in 1868. Giuseppi Fanelli came to Spain in order to recruit members for the First International, essentially a Marxist body. Altough Fanelli spoke no Spanish, his oratory was infectious, much in the same way people explain the power of Hitler’s and Lenin’s speeches: “His voice had a metallic tone and was susceptible to all the inflexions appropriate to what he was saying, passing rapidly from accents of anger and menace against tyrants and exploiters to take on those of suffering, regret and consolation…we could understand his expressive mimicry and follow his speech.”

Many of the workers who became enraptured by Fanelli’s speeches became the core of the Spanish Anarchist movement. The oppressed and marginalized working classes in Spain took well to the ideology of attacking institutions they perceived to be oppressive, such as the state, due to its corruption and brutality, “capitalism” with its divide between rich and poor, and the ancient institution of organized religion.

The First International setup a chapter in Madrid, and anarchists began holding meetings, giving speeches, and attracting new followers. By 1870, the Madrid chapter of the International had approximately 2,000 members. Anarchism would gain a much stronger following in Barcelona among a population that, just like Madrid, was introduced to forms of anarchism in the late 1860s. In 1869, the International setup a chapter in Barcelona. Anarchism grew popular in Spain, taking route in villages and cities, and resulting in many autonomous organizations.

From a historical perspective, the anarchy in Spain was essentially a form of Communism. It involved top-down decision making and the stifling of diversity. Anarchy is diversity by its very nature, and so therefore any attempts to squash diversity within any self-professed “anarchy” group is essentially an attempt to squash the movement itself.

If anarchy resurfaces in a meaningful way in Spain, it will again be a brand of Communism. And with that in mind, considering the central planning preferences of the elites in Europe, they might be open to such a movement, for any “counter-culture” movement totalitarian nature and be commercially adopted and used for statist ends.

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