Spanish Revolution of 1936


The Spanish Revolution was a social revolution that began at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, following the attempted coup to overthrow the Second Spanish Republic and arming of the worker movements and formation of militias to fight the Nationalists. It featured takeover of power at local levels by the Spanish workers' organizations and social movements, seizure and reorganization of economic facilities directed by trade union groups and local committees, and widespread implementation of socialist, more narrowly, libertarian socialist and anarchist organizational principles throughout various portions of the Republican zone, primarily Catalonia, Aragon, Andalusia, and parts of the Valencian Community.
Much of the economy of Spain was put under worker control; in anarchist strongholds like Catalonia, the figure was as high as 75%. Factories were run through worker committees, and agrarian areas became collectivized and run as libertarian socialist communes. Many small businesses, such as hotels, barber shops, and restaurants, were also collectivized and managed by their former employees. The revolutionary principles implemented with the revolution continued to evolve as much as the Republican zone existed, until the end of the civil war with the victory of the Nationalists.
The character of the revolution has been described as collectivist and pluralist, carried out by a variety of distinct, often mutually competitive and hostile, political forces and parties; the main forces behind the socioeconomic and political changes were the anarcho-syndicalists of the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo and the Iberian Anarchist Federation, the revolutionary socialists of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party, and also the Marxist party POUM.
The collectivization effort, which took place rather in agriculture than in industry, was primarily organized by the CNT and the UGT; the collectives could be organized wholly by one of the two trade unions, or by both of them as joint organizations, with the POUM, the Communist Party of Spain and sometimes the Republican Left also participating in some areas. Along with collectivization, the revolution produced a variety of other changes, including socialization of industry, which meant workers' control over enterprises or, more broadly, over an entire branch of production; in order to achieve the latter, small production and trade plants were disestablished, and their personnel was concentrated in bigger plants, or grouped together and coordinated into cartels.
The late Second Spanish Republic and the Nationalists under Francisco Franco suppressed the revolution in their respective territories after its third phase in 1937.

History

On 17 July 1936, the Spanish Coup of July 1936 began. On 18 July, the ongoing military uprising led to a collapse of the republican state and to the coercive structures of the state being dissolved or paralyzed in the places where the coup plotters did not seize power. By then, the CNT had approximately 1,577,000 members and the UGT had 1,447,000 members. On 19 July, the uprising reached Catalonia, where the workers took up arms, stormed the barracks, erected barricades, and eventually defeated the military.

First phase of the revolution (July–September 1936): ''The summer of anarchy''

The CNT and UGT unions called a general strike from 19 to 23 July, in response to both the military uprising and the apparent apathy of the state towards it. Despite the fact that there were specific records in previous days of the distribution of weapons among civilian sectors, it was during the General Strike when groups of trade unionists, linked to the convening unions and smaller groups, assaulted many of the weapons depots of the state forces, independently of whether they were in revolt against the government or not.
Already in these first weeks, two groups were established within the anarcho-syndicalist revolutionary sectors: the radical group, fundamentally linked to the Iberian Anarchist Federation and through it to the CNT, which understood the phenomenon in which it participated as a traditional revolution; and the possibilist group, made up of members of a more moderate sector of the CNT, which expressed the convenience of participating in a broader front, later called the Popular Antifascist Front, the result of adding the unions to the electoral coalition Popular Front.
At the same time, administrative structures were formed outside the state, most of a local or regional character, but exceeding such limits in specific cases; some of the most important were:
In a few days, the fronts of the Spanish Civil War were established, one of the main fronts, in the context of the revolution, being that of Aragon. On 24 July 1936, the first voluntary militia left Barcelona in the direction of Aragon. It was the Durruti Column, of around 3,000 people, mostly workers coordinated by Buenaventura Durruti, who first implemented libertarian communism in the municipalities through which they passed. In addition, other popular military structures were formed, such as the Iron Column and the Red and Black Column, the latter also departing for Aragon. All this movement gave rise to an extraordinary concentration of anarchists in parts not taken by the rebel military. The arrival, on the one hand, of the thousands of anarchist militiamen from Catalonia and Valencia, and the existence, on the other, of a large rural Aragonese popular base allowed for the progressive development of the largest collectivist experiment of the revolution.
During this first phase most of the Spanish economy was brought under the control of workers organized by the unions; mainly in anarchist areas such as Catalonia. This phenomenon extended to 75% of the total industrial sector, but in the areas of socialist influence, the rate wasn't so high. The factories were organized by workers' committees, the agricultural areas became collectivized and functioned as libertarian communes. Even places such as hotels, hairdressers, means of transport, and restaurants were collectivized and managed by their own workers.
The British author George Orwell, best known for his anti-authoritarian works Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, was a soldier in the Lenin Division of the CNT-allied POUM. Orwell meticulously documented his first-hand observations of the civil war, and expressed admiration for the social revolution in his book Homage to Catalonia.
The communes were operated according to the basic principle of "From each according to their ability, to each according to their need." In some places, money was eliminated, replaced by vouchers. Under this system, the cost of goods was often little more than a quarter of the previous cost. During the revolution, 70% of rural areas were expropriated in Catalonia, about 70% in Eastern Aragon, 91% in the republican sector of Extremadura, 58% in Castilla-La Mancha, 53% in republican Andalusia, 25% in Madrid, 24% in Murcia, and 13% in the Valencian Community. 54% of the expropriated area of republican Spain was collectivized, according to IRA data. The provinces where rural communes became most important were those of Ciudad Real – where 1,002,615 hectares were collectivized in 1938 – and Jaén – where 685,000 hectares were collectivized, leaving the rest of the republican provinces far behind. Many communes held out until the end of the war. Anarchist communes produced at a more efficient rate than before being collectivized, with productivity increasing by 20%. The newly liberated zones worked on entirely libertarian principles; decisions were made through councils of ordinary citizens without any bureaucracy.
In Aragon, where libertarian communism was proclaimed as the columns of libertarian militias passed, approximately 450 rural communes were formed, practically all of them in the hands of the CNT, with around 20 led by the UGT.
In the Valencian area, 353 communes were established, 264 led by the CNT, 69 by the UGT and 20 with mixed CNT-UGT leadership. One of its main developments was the Unified Levantine Council for Agricultural Export and the total socialization of the industries and services of the city of Alcoy.
In Catalan industry, the CNT workers' unions took over numerous textile factories, organized the trams and buses in Barcelona, established collective enterprises in fishing, in the footwear industry, and even in small retail stores and public shows. In a few days, 70% of industrial and commercial companies in Catalonia – in which, by itself, two-thirds of the industry of Spain was concentrated – had become the property of the workers.
File:Lucía Sánchez Saornil & Emma Goldman.jpg|thumb|Lucía Sánchez Saornil and Emma Goldman.
Alongside the economic revolution, there was a spirit of cultural and moral revolution: the libertarian athenaeums became meeting places and authentic cultural centers of theoretical education, in which were organized literacy classes, talks on health, excursions to the countryside, public access libraries, theatrical performances, political gatherings, sewing workshops, etc. Numerous rationalist schools were founded, which expanded the existing offers of athenaeums and union centers and in which the educational postulates of Francesc Ferrer i Guardia, Ricardo Mella, Leo Tolstoy, and Maria Montessori were carried out. Similarly, in the social field, some traditions were considered as types of oppression, and bourgeois morality was also seen as dehumanizing and individualistic. Anarchist principles defended the conscious freedom of the individual and the natural duty of solidarity among human beings as an innate tool for the progress of societies. Thus, for example, during the revolution, women achieved the right to abortion in Catalonia, the idea of consensual free love became popular, and there was a rise in naturism.
However, the social effects of the revolution were less drastic than the economic ones; while there were some social changes in larger urban areas, the attitudes of the lower classes remained fairly conservative and there was comparatively little emulation of Russian-style "revolutionary morality".
Public order also varied substantially, getting by without the classic forces of public order, which were supplanted by the Control Patrols made up of volunteers, the popular militias, and the neighborhood assemblies that were intended to resolve problems that arose. The doors of many prisons were opened, freeing the prisoners, among whom there were many politicians but also common criminals, some prisons being demolished.
The anti-fascist Carlo Rosselli, who before Mussolini's accession to power was professor of economics in the University of Genoa, put his judgment in the following words:
But despite the de facto decomposition of state power, on 2 August the government took one of its first measures to regain control against the revolution, with the creation of the Volunteer Battalions, the embryo of the Spanish Republican Army. Overwhelmed by the revolutionary phenomenon, it also promulgated some symbolic decrees:
  • 18 July: Decree declaring the military who participated in the coup to be unemployed.
  • 25 July: Decree declaring government employees who sympathize with the coup plotters to be unemployed.
  • 25 July: Decree of intervention in industry.
  • 3 August: Decree of seizure of the railways.
  • 3 August: Decree of intervention in the sale prices of food and clothing.
  • 8 August: Decree of seizure of rustic properties.
  • 13 August: Decree of closure of religious institutions.
  • 19 August : Decree of socialization and unionization of the economy.
  • 23 August: Decree of the creation of the People's Courts.
The first tensions also arose between the strategy of the anarchists and the policy of the Communist Party of Spain and its extension in Catalonia, the PSUC; and on 6 August members of the PSUC left the Catalan autonomous government because of anarcho-syndicalist pressures.