Part 1 - The New Collective Economy

Collectivizations: The Constructive Achievements of the Spanish Revolution. Essays, Documents and Reports—Agustin Souchy and Paul Folgare[1]

Publisher’s Note from the Spanish Edition of 1977

This work, which comprises one of the main sources that must be referred to for any analysis of the collectivizations that took place during the Spanish Revolution, was first published by “Tierra y Libertad” in Barcelona in 1937. After the Civil War it was republished in Toulouse by the CNT, in an edition that omitted the authors’ names.

The mere fact that the first edition of this book was published in 1937 will be enough to alert the reader to the existence of certain very general limitations imposed on the interpretation of the text. On the one hand, it was written during the critical moments of the Revolution, and vividly reflects one of the Revolution’s most important features; on the other hand, this very fact explains the optimistic tone and the apologetic character of the work, whose shortcomings include the scarcity or absence of criticisms of the collectivization process (a trait that also reflects the obvious didactic and propagandistic purposes of the authors). The positive aspects of the collectivizations, however, far outweigh the negative ones; this book presents a magnificent tableau of revolutionary achievements, and highlights, perhaps more clearly than the vast majority of literature addressing this theme, the interaction between the spontaneous elements of collectivization and the conscious elements of their creation, which were primarily led by the CNT.

The authors, the German anarchists Souchy and Folgare (actually, according to Frank Mintz, the latter name should be spelled Polgare), crafted the book on the basis of a kind of “collage” technique, mixing, as the second subtitle indicates, “essays, documents and reports”. The purpose of this technique is obviously to allow, to the greatest possible extent, by way of documents, proclamations and interviews, the collectivist workers to express themselves in the book. The authors’ role is reduced to a labor of ordering and the minimum amount of editing necessary to confer coherence upon the mass of materials they selected.

This mixture of materials introduces certain structural complications in the reading of the text, so that it is sometimes difficult, for example, to distinguish between the text written by the authors and the text consisting of the reproduction of documents or the transcription of oral accounts. Although the edition published by “Tierra y Libertad” represented a notable effort to resolve this difficulty, in the present edition we have endeavored to enhance the structural clarity of the book, especially by means of the standardization of the styles utilized for the chapter headings, subtitles, sections, etc.

We have strictly adhered to the text of the first edition of 1937. The changes that, without modifying the actual text, we have thought advisable, are as follows:

Rectification of obvious typographical errors, including various sporadic inconsistencies in internal references.

Orthographical modernization in accordance with current norms.

Changing certain initials of numerous names from the upper case to the lower case, although we preserved the upper case usage wherever it was minimally admissible.

We have not eliminated the quite numerous solecisms; only in rare cases, and when it was strongly advisable, have we changed an incorrect word and inserted the correct one, but have on such occasions noted the change in a footnote; on other occasions, we have preserved the incorrect word from the original text, and have inserted a footnote in which we have suggested the word we think is the correct one. Almost always, however, the context makes the meaning of the words that are incorrectly used clear enough to make any such clarification unnecessary.

The punctuation in the text, although often dubious, has been nonetheless preserved as it is in the original, as it does not in any case prejudice a correct understanding of the text.

Introduction

Workers all over the world have understood that the Spanish struggle is their struggle, too. The obstinate silence of the entire bourgeois press, as well as all the resulting difficulties and the scarce media outlets possessed by the Spanish revolutionaries, on the one hand, and the persecution, the cover-up, and the prohibition of their dissemination of information by the enemies of the working class, on the other hand, have generally prevented the workers from obtaining a veracious account of the revolutionary achievements of the libertarian movement in Spain. Nonetheless, this has not prevented them from expressing all their sympathies for them.

Meanwhile we have deemed it useful and necessary to provide an account, for all those who have long felt sympathy for and acted in support of the freedom fighters, of this labor of liberation that was carried out in the rearguard.

It seemed to us that we would best serve this informational purpose by letting the Spanish revolutionaries speak for themselves as much as possible. The summary that we present here contains, besides some brief schematic explanations (added only in order to provide a more complete picture), original documents, for the most part: confiscation decrees, reports of the trade unions, minutes of meetings, statutes, etc., and the reports drafted by the Industrial committees and by the various local committees for the organs of the revolutionary movement.

Nor have we thought it necessary to change either the style or the content of these documents. Through them the Spanish Revolution speaks, the action of the proletariat as it was expressed at the time, and the quite simple pathos of some of these declarations from those memorable days of struggle provides a better depiction of the events to the foreign reader than the most precise statistics or the most profound analyzes.

You will not find within this book either falsifying praise, or distorting exaggerations. We have simply let the Spanish worker speak for himself so he can tell the entire world what he has done to vindicate and defend his liberty and his well being.