We must leave the details of that revolution—its astonishing achievements and its tragic subversion—to another volume. That Sanjurjo was to perish in a plane crash on his way to Spain, leaving Franco commander of the entire military uprising; that the war on the peninsula was to become inextricably tied to European power politics; that ijpain was to endure three tormenting years of internecine conflict—all of these events belong to the conventional histories of the Spanish Civil War. Without entering into a discussion at this time of the Anarchist collectives and the experiments in workers’ control of industry that developed in the latter half of 1936, we must try to assess the meaning of the events recounted in this volume. What was the place of the Spanish Anarchist movement in the larger history of proletarian socialism? What were its possibilities—and its limits? Are the organizational forms developed by the CNT and FAI relevant to radical movements in our own time? Today, long after the Spanish Anarchist movement was destroyed by Franco, these beguiling questions linger on. The movement still haunts us—not only as a noble dream or perhaps a tragic memory, but as a fascinating test of libertarian theory and practice.

Although Spanish Anarchism was virtually unknown to radicals abroad during the “heroic years” of its development, it could be argued in all earnestness that it marked the most magnificent flowering and, in the curious dialectic of such processes, the definitive end, of the century-long history of proletarian Socialism.

The emergence of the working’class, specifically of the Parisian proletariat, as a revolutionary force on the June barricades of 1848 had totally changed the landscape of earlier radical theory. Until that event, critical views of society had been shaped by the notion of a broad populist conflict between an entrenched minority of oppressors and a dominated mass of oppressed. Radicals generally conceived of these polarized segments of society in very ill-defined terms. Under the rubric of the “people” (le peuple), they fashioned a broad constituency in which highly variegated, later historically hostile, strata such as craftsmen, factory workers, peasants, professionals, petty merchants, and entrepreneurs of small industrial installations were cemented by a common oppression at the hands of monarchs, aristocrats, and the wealthiest sectors of commercial, financial, and industrial classes. Accordingly, the “people” were united more by the social elements they opposed than by an authentic community of shared economic interests.

In the opening years of the Great French Revolution of 1789, the “people” was actually a coalition rather than a class. As the revolution unfolded, this coalition began to disintegrate. Lofty utopian ideals based on liberty and equality could not suppress antagonisms that craftsmen felt for their erstwhile merchant allies or factory workers for their employers. Nor were these ideals sufficient to temper the narrow parochialism of the peasantry and the egotistical aspirations for advancement on the part of the professionals. “Nationhood,” “patriotism,” and the republican virtues that inhered in the concept of “citizenship” barely concealed the widening antagonisms and diverging interests that coexisted within the so-called “Third Estate,”—a term, it is worth noting, that was initially borrowed from feudalism in order to oppose feudalism.

The June 1848 rising of the Parisian proletariat replaced the populist struggle with the class struggle, dispelling the traditional mystique of the “people,” the “nation,” and the “citizen.” It was now clear that the popular coalitions against pre-industrial elites embodied hostile classes. A “scientific” socialism, divested of any moral or ethical content, began to replace the ethically charged populist and utopian socialism that had been born in the late years of the Great French Revolution and its aftermath. “Surplus value” was an increment unique in form: the bourgeoisie acquired it not by the forcible appropriation of surplus labor and of the laborers themselves but by the seemingly fair exhange of labor power for wages on the open market. Workers were no longer slaves or serfs; they were juridically “free” and hence represented an historically unprecedented type of oppressed class. Lacking the industrial facilities which were owned by the bourgeoisie, they were free to work—or, of course, to starve. “Liberty” in becoming a political reality, had only been rendered even more of an economic fiction. By the mere possession of industrial facilities that were too large to belong to the tool kit of the traditional craftsmen, the bourgeoisie (itself a unique historical class) had emerged, and by the mere workings of the free market in labor power, this class was able to ensnare the proletariat in a skein of subservience, expropriation, and exploitation. Everyone in society was “free” and “equal”; indeed, this very “freedom” to own property without restriction and the “equality” of a fair exchange of labor power for wages concealed the enslavement of the workers to capital as an inevitable process.[47]

The “free market” also made inevitable the radicalization of the proletariat. The ongoing competition between “free entrepreneurs,” each seeking to capture an increasing portion of the market, involved a ruthless process of price-cutting and capital accumulation, concomitantly leading to overall reductions in the wages of the working class. Eventually, the working class would become so impoverished that it would be driven to social revolution. Marx gave no credence to the notion that the proletariat would revolt under the impulse of high-minded ideals. “When socialist writers ascribe this revolutionary historic role to the proletariat,” he observes,

it is not ... because they consider the proletarians as gods. Rather the contrary. Since the abstraction of all humanity, even of the semblance of humanity, is practically complete in the full-grown proletariat [my emphasis, here—M.B.] since all the conditions of life of the proletariat sum up alf the conditions of life of society today in all their inhuman acuity; since man has lost himself in the proletariat, yet at the same time has not only gained theoretical consciousness of that loss, but through urgent, no longer disguisable, absolutely imperative need—that practical expression of necessity—is driven directly to revolt against that inhumanity.... Not in vain does it go through the stern but steeling school of labor. The question is not what this or that proletarian, or even the whole of the proletariat at the moment considers as its aim. The question is what the proletariat is, and what, consequent on that being, it will be compelled to do.[48]

Accordingly, socialism becomes “scientific” and develops as a science’ of “proletarian socialism” because of what the proletariat “will be compelled to do,*” not because it is composed of “gods.” Marx, moreover, imparted this revolutionary function to the “full-grown proletariat,” not to declasse peasants who had been removed from the land or to impoverished craftsmen, the social strata with which the capitalist class was to man the factories and mills of industrial society. Unless events patently forced Marx to acknowledge the radical traits and insurrectionary volatility of these declasse elements, he generally viewed such strata as the alte scheisse (the “old shit”), lingering over from the formative era of industrial capitalism. The hopes of “proletarian socialism” lay primarily in the “full-grown” proletariat of modern industry, “a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself.” Proletarian socialism, in effect, was meant to demystify the notion of the “people” as a homogeneous revolutionary mass and to demonstrate that beliefs such as “liberty” and “equality” could not be divorced from the material conditions of social life.

Yet within this very process of demystification, Marxism generated a number of highly misleading myths which were to show the limits of proletarian socialism itself. The June barricades of 1848 had in fact been manned not by an industrial proletariat “disciplined, united, and organized by the process of capitalist production,” but by craftsmen, home-workers, nondescript laborers of every sort, porters, unemployed urban and rural poor, even tavern keepers, waiters, and prostitutes—in short, the flotsam and jetsam of French society which the ruling classes had habitually designated as canaille. These very same elements, nearly a quarter of a century later, were to man the barricades of the Paris Commune. It was precisely the industrialization of France after the Commune—and with this process, the emergence of a “full-grown” hereditary proletariat “disciplined, united, organized by the process of capitalist production”—that finally was to silence the “crowing” of the French “Red Cock” that had summoned Europe to revolution during the nineteenth century. Indeed, much the same could be said of the Russian proletariat of 1917, so recently recruited from the countryside that it was anything but a “full-grown” working class.

The great proletarian insurrections that seemed to lend such compelling support to the concept of proletarian socialism were fueled primarily by social strata that lived within neither industrial nor village society but in the tense, almost electrifying force-field of both. Proletarian socialism became a revolutionary force for nearly a century not because a well-organized, consolidated, hereditary proletariat had emerged with the factory system but because of the very process of proletarianization. Dispossessed rural people and craftsmen were being removed from a disintegrating preindustrial way of life and plunged into standardized, dehumanizing, and mechanized urban and industrial surroundings. Neither the village and small shop as such nor the factory as such predisposed them to the boldest kind of social action; rather, they were moved by the disintegration of the former and the shock of the latter. Demoralized to the point of recklessness, declasse in spirit and often in fact, they became the adherents of the Paris Commune, the Petrograd soviets, and the Barcelona CNT.

The very “half-grown” quality of the early proletariat, formerly peasants and craftsmen or perhaps a generation removed from such status, produced a volatility, intractability, and boldness that the industrial system and factory hierarchy was to attenuate in their descendants—the hereditary proletariat of the 1940s and 1950s, a class that knew no other world but the industrial one. For this class, no tension was to exist between town and country, the anomie of the city and the sense of shared responsibility of the small community, the standardized rythmns of the factory and the physiological rhythms of the land. The premises of the proletariat in this later era were formed around the validity of the factory as an arena of productive activity, the industrial hierarchy as a system of technical authority, and the union bureaucracy as a structure of class command. The era of proletarian socialism came to an end in a step-by-step process during which the “half-grown,” presumably “primitive,” proletariat became “full-grown,” “mature”—in short, fully proletarianized.

The proletariat, in effect, became psychologically and spiritually part of the very social system it had been destined, according to Marxian precept, to overthrow. Proletarian socialism, not surprisingly, became an institutionalized movement for the industrial mobilization of labor, largely economistic in its goals; it solidified into labor parties that articulated a pragmatic liberalism, thereby blunting even the Intellectual susceptibility of the working class to revolutionary ideals. Finally and most disastrously, it fuzed with capitalism’s inherent historic trend toward economic planning, centralized political and industrial control, hierarchical regulation, and economic nationalization. The socialist ideal of freedom, divested of its ethical content by “scientific socialism” and burdened with the pragmatic considerations of centralized planning and economic nationalization, became a mere ideological device for mobilizing popular support around state capitalism.

If only because of the element of time, Spanish Anarchism did not share the historic fate of proletarian socialism. Indeed, it may very well have formed the last step in the development of revolutionary proletarian socialism before the latter’s destiny as a variant of state-capitalist ideology became evident. In any case, the libertarian revolution of July 1936 seemed to have gathered to itself many of the noble qualities that were only partially developed in earlier uprisings of the worker’s movement. In July 1936, the CNT and FAI were sufficiently independent as a workers’ movement, certainly by comparison with the Socialists and POUM, to make Barcelona the most revolutionary city in Spain. No other large urban area was to achieve the social goals of revolutionary syndicalism as fully, to collectivize industry as resolutely, and to foster communal forms of land management as extensively as Barcelona and its environs. Orwell’s description of the city during this phase is still intoxicating: the squares and avenues bedecked with black-and-red flags, the armed people, the slogans, the stirring revolutionary songs, the feverish enthusiasm of creating a new world, the gleaming hope, and the inspired heroism.

Yet the limits of this development become painfully evident if one asks: could there have been an Anarchosyndicalist society even if the generals had been crushed in 1936? Apparently, very few serious Anarchist theoreticians seem to have believed this. A mixed economy, yes—although how long the revolutionary fervor of the more ascetic communistic collectives might have resisted the temptations and demands of a coexisting market economy is difficult to predict. Whether a communist revolution could occur in an industrially undeveloped country—indeed, whether such a revolution might even succeed temporarily under materially demanding conditions of life—has never been a matter of dispute between Marx and the Anarchists.[49] Whether such a revolution could permanently establish a communist society, however, is quite another matter. In a work called After the Revolution, written shortly before the military rebellion and widely discussed within the Spanish Anarchist movement, the distinguished Anarchist theorist Abad de Santillan shows a keen realization of the importance of this problem:

We are cognizant of the fact that the grade of economic development and material conditions of life influence powerfully human psychology. Faced with starvation, the individual becomes an egoist; with abundance he may become generous , friendly and socially disposed. All periods of privation and penury produce brutality, moral regression and a fierce struggle of all against all for daily bread. Consequently, it is plain that economics influences seriously the spiritual life of the individual and his social relations.That is precisely why we are aiming to establish the best possible economic conditions, which will act as a guarantee of equal and solid relationships among men. We will not stop being anarchists, on an empty stomach, but we do not exactly like to have empty stomachs.

The problem of material scarcity is not merely that “Man pitted against man is a wolf and he can never become a real brother to man, unless he has material security,” but perhaps more significantly that with material security, indeed, with abundance, human beings can also discover what they do not need. I refer not only to material needs but also to spiritual ones—notably competition, money, and even contracts and social institutions that underwrite strict systems of reciprocity based on equivalences. No longer driven by material insecurity, no longer a creature of brute necessity, the individual can advance from the realm of “fairness,” equivalence, and justice to the much higher moral realm of freedom in which people work to the best of their abilities and receive according to their needs. Finally, in an abundant economy that can provide for personal needs with a minimum of toil, the individual can acquire the free time for self-cultivation and full participation in the direct management of social life.

Spanish Anarchism revealed how far proletarian socialism could press toward an ideal of freedom on moral premises alone. Given a favorable conjunction of events, a revolutionary workers’ and peasants’ movement had indeed been able to make a libertarian revolution, collectivize industry, and create historically unprecedented possibilities for the management of the factories and land by those who worked them. Indeed, the revolutionary act of crushing the military rebellion in key cities of Spain,” of taking direct control of the economy, even if under the mere compulsion of external events, had acted as a powerful spiritual impulse in its own right, appreciably altering the attitudes and views of less committed sectors of the oppressed. Thus proletarian socialism had pushed Spanish society beyond any materially delimiting barriers into a utopian experiment of astonishing proportions—into what Burnett Bolloten has aptly described as a “far-reaching social revolution ... more profound in. jorne respects than the Bolshevik revolution in its early stages....” Not only had workers established control over industry and peasants formed free collectives on the land, but in many instances even money had been abolished and the most radical communistic precepts had replaced bourgeois concepts of work, distribution, and administration.

But what would happen when everyday life began to feel the pinch of economic want—of the material problems imposed not only by the Civil War but by Spain’s narrow technological base? “Communism will be the result of abundance,” Santillan had warned in the spring of 1936, “without which it will remain only an ideal.” Could the revolutionary ardor of the CNT and FAI surmount the obstacles of scarcity and material want in the basic necessities of life, obstacles that had limited the forward thrust of earlier revolutions? Could mutual aid and proletarian initiative survive the drift toward egotism and bureaucratization? The answers to these questions must be deferred to the next volume, together with an account of the impact of Stalinist counterrevolution, particularly in the Anarchist areas of Spain.

But the paradox confronting the classical doctrine of proletarian socialism must be seen clearly, if the Spanish Revolution is to have any meaning for our times. Proletarian socialism, as doctrine and historic movement, is trapped by its very premises. For workers to become revolutionary as workers—as a class of dispossessed wage earners engaged in an irreconcilable struggle with a class of capitalist property-owners—presupposes the very material want which in no small measure prevents the proletariat from directly organizing and controlling society. Material want, a product not only of exploitation but also of an inadequate technological base, denies workers the material security and free time to transform the totality of society—economic, political, and spiritual conditions of life.

The relatively affluent decades that were to follow the Spanish Revolution—decades that were a product not only of economic rationalization and planning along state capitalist lines but also of extraordinary technological achievement—revealed that the proletariat could be absorbed into bourgeois society, that it could be turned into an adaptive rather than a revolutionary class. Organized and disciplined by the factory, it could in tact become an extension of the factory into society at large, a victim of the factory’s narrow economistic functions and its system of standardization and hierarchy. I am not contending here that any social revolution in our time can be achieved without the active support of the proletariat but rather that any such revolution can no longer be cast in terms of “proletarian hegemony,” of working-class leadership. A social revolution, at least in the advanced capitalist countries of the world, presupposes a wide-ranging discontent with every aspect of capitalist society: the anomie and atomization fostered by the bourgeois megalopolis, discontent with the quality of everyday life, an awareness of the meaninglessness of a life devoted to mindless toil, an acute consciousness of hierarchy and domination in all its forms. In the case of hierarchy and domination, a liberated society would be expected to feel the need to abolish not only class rule and economic exploitation, but the domination of women by men, of the young by the old, of one ethnic group by another. One can easily enumerate a host of such broader issues and these have increasingly supplanted, even within the working class itself, the traditional economic issues that emerged out of the struggle between wage labor and capital. The traditional issues of wages, hours, and working conditions remain, to be sure, and the traditional struggle continues, but they have lost their revolutionary thrust. History itself has turned them into routine problems of negotiation, to be dealt with through established mechanisms and institutions that function entirely within the system. The steady erosion of the trade-union movement and of labor parties from institutions with a larger social vision to a “loyal opposition” within the factory, office, and state is perhaps the most telling evidence of this degeneration.

The larger problems of abolishing hierarchy and domination, of achieving a spiritually nourishing daily life, of replacing mindless toil by meaningful work, of attaining the free time for the selfmanagement of a truly solidarizing human community—all of these growing demands have emerged not from a perspective of mere survival in an economy of scarce means, but rather from the very opposite social constellation. They stem from a gnawing tension, the problem of new technological advances, between needless scarcity on the one hand and the promise of free time and the satisfaction of basic human wants on the other. This tension is felt by a much wider constituency than the industrial proletariat. It can be sensed in students, professionals, small proprietors, so-called “white-collar” workers, service and government employes, declasse elements, and even sections of the bourgeoisie as well as in the “full-grown” proletariat—in short, in sectors of society that were never accorded serious consideration as forces for revolution within the framework of proletarian socialism. This tension centers not only on economic problems but spiritual ones as well. It fosters a unique commitment not so much to “socialism,” with its highly centralized state institutions and hierarchically organized bureaucratic infrastructure, but to a vision of a nonhierarchical, libertarian society (often simplistically designated as “socialism”) in which people in free communities administer society on the basis of direct democracy and exercise full control over their daily lives.

The genius of Spanish Anarchism stems from its ability to fuze the concerns of traditional proletarian socialism with broader more contemporary aspirations. In the very act of criticizing one remarkable achievement of the Spanish Anarchist movement, the affinity group, Santillan inadvertently reveals its uniqueness. Moreover, he discloses the clash between tradition and dream that existed within Spanish Anarchism in the 1930s. “We believe there is a little confusion in some libertarian circles between social conviviality, group affinity and the economic function,” he warns. “Visions of happy Arcadias or free communes were imagined by the poets of the past; for the future, conditions appear quite different. In the factory we do not seek the affinity of friendship but the affinity of work. It is not an affinity of character, except on the basis of professional capacity and quality of work, which is the basis of conviviality in the factory.” —

These are stern words. They emerge from the vocabulary of scarcity, the work ethic, toil, and Iberian puritanical mores. They would have been viewed as gravely realistic injunctions by the leaders of the Spanish Socialist Party. They reflect the harsh realities of proletarian socialism in the 1930s, not the sensibilities of the “future.”

But the fact that for Santillan to enjoin his comrades in the spring of 1936 to reject “social conviviality” in the work process, to eliminate “group affinity” in productive activity as an archaic vision of “happy Arcadias,” reveals the visionary form in which such groups were actually seen by many Spanish Anarchists. If we, today, increasingly see the need to turn work into a festive and “Arcadian” experience, if we address ourselves to a new sense of possibility that inheres in the work process, we would do well to recognize that it is only because of the technological opportunities created by our own time that we enjoy this privilege. Proletarian socialism in the 1930s had turned the factory not only into the locus of social change but into the reality principle of the socialist spirit. In a world of material scarcity and toil, this reality principle allowed for minimal “social conviviality.” Santillan errs primarily in one respect: he speaks not for the “future” but for the “present,” a “present” whose values were destined to undergo major transformation in the decades that lay ahead. A dedicated Anarchist of a distinct historical era, he reveals all its limitations even as he tries pragmatically to chart its future trajectory. Although he may have been correct for his time, it was a time that could scarcely yield a society of “happy Arcadias” in which the means of life would be freely available to all and work would be performed according to one’s desire and ability.

How did it happen than, that the Spanish Anarchists in the 1930s formed such visions of “social conviviality,” “group affinity,” and “happy Arcadias”? On this score at least, Santillan, even as he voices his objections, is true to the locale as well as to the time of his movement. The Spanish Anarchists who held these Arcadian visions were, in fact, poets of the past. They had formed their dreams from the “social conviviality” of their pueblos, from their pre-industrial culture and spiritual heritage. To use our own terms, in their dreams the Spanish Anarchists perpetuated a sense of continuity with a “primitive communism” of the past, one which they doubtless idealized within the context of Spanish conditions. Yet this communism, despite its “primitiveness,” possessed more elements of the sophisticated communism of the future than the factory socialism of the workers’ movement. It should not be forgotten that the “happy Arcadias” and “free communes” which Spanish Anarchists had borrowed from visions of the past were often no less stern than Santillan’s image of the factory. They too conceived their communal, free “Arcadias” in gravely puritanical terms. They believed in “free love” because they believed in the freedom to mate without political or religious sanction, but they shunned free sexuality and promiscuity. They envisioned conviviality at the work place, but they admired hard work and almost celebrated its purifying qualities. In their “Arcadian” society there could be “no rights without duties, no duties without rights.” Although all these traits add a spiritual, ethical, and convivial dimension to the proletarian socialism of the factory, it is a socialism that is built no less around scarcity, denial, and toil than is Santillan’s. Santillan merely tried to remind them of the contradiction that lurked in their vision, for there could be no real “Arcadias” unless the land flowed with milk and honey. If the paradisiacal poetry to which Santillan refers has any possibility of reality today, the puritanical Spanish Anarchist “Arcadia” of yesteryear was no less a vision, a “mere ideal,” than Santillan’s sterner vision of a future libertarian society based on “the affinity of work.”

Yet the Spanish Anarchists left behind a tangible reality that has considerable relevance for social radicalism today.Their movement’s “heroic years,” 1868 to 1936, were marked by a fascinating process of experimentation in organizational forms, decision-making techniques, personal values, educational goals, and methods of struggle. From the days of the International and the Alliance of Social Democracy to those of the CNT and FAI, Spanish Anarchists of all varieties—collectivist, syndicalist, and communist—had evolved an astonishingly well-organized subculture within Spanish society that fostered enormous freedom of action by local syndicates and affinity groups. If the Spanish political sphere had denied the individual peasant and worker full participation in the management of social affairs, the Anarchist movement nourished their participation. Far more important than the episodic revolutionary uprisings, the individual atentados, or the daring escapades of small circles of comrades like the ‘Solidarios was the ability of the Spanish Anarchists to patiently knit together highly independent groups (united by “social conviviality” as well as by social views) into sizable, coherent organizations to coordinate them into effective social forces when crises emerged, and to develop an informed mode of spontaneity that fuzed the most valuable traits of group discipline with personal initiative. Out of this process emerged an organic community and a sense of mutual aid unequaled by any workers’ movement of that era. Indeed, no less important as a subject of study than the workers’ committees and agrarian collectives that were to follow the July revolution was the movement that created the ground work for libertarian social structures—the Spanish Anarchist movement itself.

Bibliographical Essay

1. General Works

Surprisingly few general histories of Spanish Anarchism exist in any language and those which are available, with a couple of exceptions, are too cursory to supply a very rewarding account of the movement. Juan Gomez Casa’s Historia del Anarcosindicalismo (Madrid, 1968) is simply an outline of the major events in Spanish Anarchist history and does not live up to its grandiloquent title. Jean Becarud and Gilles Lapouge’s Anarchistes d Espagne (Paris, 1970) is even more abbreviated and offers only a glimpse of its subject matter. Eduardo Comin Colomer’s two-volume Historia del Anarquismo Espanol 1836–1948 (Barcelona 1956) is a typical Francoist historia secreta, written from an internal knowledge of the police files. It contains a wealth of anecdotal material but it is often impossible to determine where the serious historian ends and the Francoist official begins.

Despite the minor errors that scholars have cited, Gerald Brenan’s The Spanish Labyrinth (London, 1943) still remains the finest and most moving account in English of the Spanish Anarchists to date. Brenan was never an Anarchist and less than half of his book deals with Anarchism as such yet like so many non-Spaniards in Spain, he came to admire the Anarchist movement with a warmth that occasionally verges on enthusiasm. Perhaps the weakest aspect of his book might be called its “Andalusian” standpoint: the author’s view of the movement was shaped by his experiences with rural rather than urban Anarchism and he tends to give too much weight to its quasi-religious agrarian “millenarianism.” Admittedly this emphasis adds a great deal of color to his account but it does not provide a satisfactory explanation of the CNT and FAI’s development in the industrial centers of Spain. Franz Borkenau’s The Spanish Cockpit (London, 1937), a very thoughtful book in its own right, also depicts Anarchi m as a quasi-religious movement one which, despite Borkenau’s Socialist convictions, earns his esteem. To counterbalance Brenan and Borkenau’s semi-mystical treatment of Spanish Anarchism, the reader might care to consult Diego Abad de Santillan’s recent series, Contribution a la Historia del Movimiento Obrero Espanol, the first volume of which was published in Madrid in 1968. The reader should expect a textbook-like survey of the workers’ movement, however, which often lacks the color and drama that one would expect to find after reading Brenan.

Introductory surveys of the early history of Spanish Anarchism appear in many of the larger works cited below. They serve primarily to orient the reader toward the specific period under discussion and do not constitute substitutes for a history of the movement. The opening chapters of Cesar M. Lorenzo’s Les Anarchistes Espagnols et le Pouvoir (Paris, 1969), Jose Peirats’s Los Anarquistas en la Crisis Politica Espanola (Buenos Aires, 1964), and Manuel Buenacasa’s El Movimiento Obrero Espanol (Paris, 1966) are the best I have found of such summaries. As for surveys of Spanish Anarchism included in general histories of the international Anarchist movement or histories of Spain (at least those of recent vintage), some of them tend merely to repeat Brenan; others adopt a tone that is patronizing, if not bitterly caustic.

2. Early History (Chapters I-I1I).

The period prior to Fanelli’s arrival in Spain is admirably covered by Femanco Garrido Tortosa’s Historia de las Asociaciones Obreras en Europa (Madrid, 1870). This two-volume account is perhaps the most valuable available source on early Spanish working-ilass movements. Garrido was a friend of Reclus and toured Spain with him; his observations are based not merely on research into these movements but also on participation in them. In English, a splendid survey of early labor agitation appears in Bruce Levine’s Economic and Social Mobilization: Spain, 1830–1923 (Ann Arbor, unpublished), a sizable paper that correlates the activities of workers’ and peasants’ movements with Spanish industrial development and agrarian reform.

A great deal of material now exists on the period during which the First International was formed in Spain. Within a single year, two excellent studies have appeared: Joseph Termes’s Anarquismo y Sindicalismo en Espana: La Primera International (1864–1881) (Barcelona, 1972) and Clara E. Lida’s Anarquismo y Revolution en la Espana del XIX (Madrid, 1972). In the following year, Lida published an accompanying volume of texts and documents under the title, Antecedentes y Desarrolla del Movimiento Obrero Espanol (Madrid, 1973), which also throws considerable light on the period from 1835 to 1868.

On the formation and development of Spanish Anarchism, the reader should consult Anselmo Lorenzo’s El Proletariado Militante (originally published in Barcelona, Vol. I, 1901; Vol. II, 1903); Juan Diaz del Moral’s Historia de las Agitaciones Campesinas Andaluzas (originally published in Madrid, 1929); Max Nettlau’s Miguel Bakunin, la International y la Alianza en Espana (originally published in Buenos Aires, 1925); and Casimiro Marti’s Origenes del Anarquismo en Barcelona (Barcelona, 1959). Lorenzo and Diaz del Moral’s works are the real classics on the development of early Spanish Anarchism and provide major sources of data for later, more scholarly studies. El Proletariado Militante is really a memoir by one Of the founders and outstanding propagandists of Spanish Anarchism. Diaz del Moral was not merely a historian but also an observer of some of the events he describes. Nettlau and Casimiro Marti have produced two brief but masterful pieces of research.

Many other workers provided invaluable background material for an understanding of this period, notably Nettlau’s Documentos Ineditos sobre la International y la Alianza en Espana (Buenos Aires, 1930) and his highly informative articles in La Reuista Blanca (September 1, 1928 — May 1,1929), published under the title, “Impresiones historicas sobre el desarrollo del Socialismo en Espana,” a superb series that has yet to be compiled as a volume; Juan Jose Morato’s Historia de la Section Espanola de la International, 1868–1874 (Madrid, 1930); James Guillame’s excellent four-volume L’Internationale, Documents et Souvenirs (Paris, 1905–1910), in my view one of the most outstanding of the many histories that are available on the First International; Maximiano Garcia Venero’s three-volume Historia de las Internationales en Espana (Madrid, 1956–1958) and the same author’s Historias de los Mooimientos Sindicalistas Espanoles (1840–1933) (Madrid, 1961).

Of the social histories of Spain, Brenan’s The Spanish Labyrinth is certainly one of the most outstanding. For a truly exhaustive history, the reader may care to consult the five-volume series Historia Social y Economica de Espana y America, edited by Jaime Vicens Vives (Barcelona, 1957–1959) and Vicens Vives’s An Economic History of Spain (Princeton, 1969). One of the best sources for popular collectivism in Spain is Joaquin Costa’s Colectivismo Agrario en Espana (orginally published in Madrid, 1898). Raymond Carr’s Spain, 1808–1939 (Oxford, 1966) is an eminently readable and highly informative work on political events. Apart from Brenan’s account, I know of no book in English that is more deeply sympathetic to—or so ably conveys—the libertarian spirit of the Spanish people than Elena de La Souchere’s An Explanation of Spain (New York, 1964). Perhaps the most perceptive analysis of Spanish society is to be found in Karl Marx’s “Revolutionary Spain,” a series of articles published by the New York Daily Tribune between September 9 and December 4, 1854. These articles are compiled in Marx and Engels’s Revolution in Spain (New York, 1939), a book that is sadly marred not only by Stalinist editing but by Engels’s vulgar interpretation of early syndicalism in a propaganda diatribe, “The Bakuninists at Work.”

Perhaps the best work I can recommend on Spanish Federalism is C. A.M. Hennessy’s The Federal Rebublic in Spain (Oxford, 1962). Hennessy has also compiled a very extensive bibliography on the subject. R. Coloma’s widely cited La Revolution Internacionalista Alcoyana de 1873 (Alicante, 1959), a work which seems to have acquired the reputation of an authoritative account on the Alcoy uprising, seems in my view to be patently biased against the Internationalists and their working-class supporters. Accordingly, my account has been based on a sifting of the limited literature and the available press accounts of the event. Fortunately, Clara Lida, in her Anarquismo y Revolution en la Espana del XIX, carefully examines material on the uprising (see pages 216–22) and has produced a long-needed balanced account.

Even more problematical is the figure of Mikhail Bakunin—both the man and his social views. At this writing, no worthwhile biography*af Bakunin exists in English. E.H. Carr, in his Michael Bakunin (London, 1937), has brought painstaking scholarship to the service of what are often scandalously trivial goals, including Bakunin’s impecuniosity and sex life. Carr’s account is steeped in malice toward his subject. Of the published material available to the reader, H.E. Kaminski’s Bakunin-La Vie d’un Revolutionnaire (Paris, 1938) is the best biography to consult on Bakunin’s activities, but it still awaits translation into English. The quotations from Bakunin in the text were taken from Gregory Maximoff’s very unsatisfactory mosaic of Bakunin’s writings, The Political Philosophy of Bakunin (Glencoe, 1953), a work that has been superseded over the past few years by more representative selections, notably in Bakunin on Anarchy, edited by Sam Dolgoff (New York, 1972), and Michael Bakunin’s Selected Writings, edited by Arthur Lehning (London, 1973). Dolgoff’s book also contains a very extensive bibliography, including an account of the Steklov and Nettlau biographies of Bakunin, available only in special collections and archives.

3. From the International to the CNT (Chapters IV and Vll).

Virtually every account of peasant Anarchism in Spain owes a great debt to Diaz del Moral, who,also enjoys the distinction of fostering the “millenarian” orientation that characterizes so many English works on the subject. Joaquin Costa’s Oligarquia y Catiquismo como la Forma Actual de Gobiemo en Espana (orginally published in Madrid, 1902) provides indispensable material on the cacique system and Vicens Vives’s Historia Social y Economica ... is an invaluable source of data and insights on Spainish agrarian problems. In Politics, Economics and Men of Modem Spain (1808–1946) (London, 1946), the intertwining of agrarian with political interests is discussed with much verve by A. Ramos Oliveira, a writer who is not to be denied his strong political prejudices and his animosity toward the Anarchists.

One of the most definitive studies of Spanish agricultural and rural unrest appears in Edward E. Malefakis’s Agrarian Reform and Peasant Revolution in Spain (New Haven, 1970). The book also has an excellent bibliography. Although Malefakis is not sympathetic to the Anarchists, he clearly delineates their options and dilemmas. His later chapters provide a valuable account of their duels with the Socialists during the 1930s. For an excellent account of the poverty endured by the braceros, see “Agrarian Problems in Spain” by E.H.G. Dobby, Geographical Review of the American Geographical Society April, 1936). To gain some sense of the atmosphere of pueblo life—its parochialism as well as its internal solidarity—the reader should consult Michael Kenny’s A Spanish Tapestry (New York, 1961) and J.S. Pitt-Rivers’s sensitive study of an Andalusian mountain village, The People of the Sierra (Chicago, 1961). E.J. Hobsbawm’s essay on Anarchist “millenarianism” in Primitive Rebels (Manchester, 1959) is riddled by Marxian prejudgments on the “archaic” nature of Anarchism. Apart from useful information about the Casas Viejas uprising, he adds very little to what Diaz del Moral observes with greater sympathy for his subject.

Very little has been written about the trajectory of Spanish Anarchism from the decline of the International to the emergence of the Solidaridad Obrera federation after the turn of the century. To establish a reasonably detailed continuity of events, it was necessary to turn to biographies and newpaper accounts for inportant data. Nettlau’s “Impresiones historicas sobre el desarrollo del Socialismo en Espana” in La Revista Blanca (Numero 140, 1929) is informative, as is Pedro Vallina’s biography of Salvochea, Cronica de un Revolucionario (Paris, 1958). The reader may also care to consult the opening chapters of Buenacasa’s El Movimiento Obrero Espanol and the larger histories of Spanish Anarchism. Clara E. Lida’s book of documents contains valuable statements, appeals, and reports up to the late 1880s. On Salvochea’s life, the reader should examine not only Vallina, but also Rudolph Rocker’s Fermin Salvochea in the Precursores de la Libertad series (No. 1,1945) and the few pages of vignettes of Salvochea which Buenacasa includes in his El Movimiento Obrero Espanol.

Recent research has reopened the Mano Negra period for reevaluation and fresh discussion. Iris Zavala’s discovery in the Archivo de Palacio in Madrid of a copy of a document purported to be the Mano Negra’s “regulations,” a document drawn up some five years before the Mano Negra trials of 1883, does not entirely dispel my doubts about the reality of the organization. A copy is not an original and, given the circumstances of the time, even an “original” document would warrant the most scrupulous authentication, in my opinion, before any question of police forgery could be removed. Clara E. Lida accepts this document as fact and discusses its social context in “Agrarian Anarchism in Andalusia,” International Review of Social History, XIV, 3 (1969). Her review of the period makes the article well worth reading, quite aside from the dispute that may arise about the authenticity of the document itself. On the trials, Ediciones “CNT” has republished El Proceso de “La Mano Negra” (Toulouse, 1958), an old collection of excerpts from statements of the accused and critical comments of the charges and proceedings. See also Glenn Wagoner’s^rticle, “The Black Hand Mystery,” in Modem European Social History, ed. Robert Becucha (London, 1972).

Lida’s article contains many informative observations on the disputes between the traditional Anarcho-collectivists and the emerging Anarcho-communists. Brenan’s The Spanish Labyrinth and Max Nomad’s “The Anarchist Tradition” (The Revolutionary Internationals, ed. M.M. Drachkovitch [Stanford, 1966]) provide valuable accounts of this split. For a succinct statement of Anarcho-communist principles, the reader should go directly to Peter Kropotkin’s early essay “Anarchist Communism: Its Basis and Principles” (Revolutionary Pamphlets [New York, 1928]) and to his The Conquest of Bread (London, 1906). Fortunately, both volumes have recently been published in the United States and are no longer difficult to acquire.

My account of the terrorist movement at the turn of the century is drawn from so many sources, including contemporary newspaper accounts, that a single work is difficult to cite. The already cited volumes by Brenan, Peirats, Buenacasa, and Abad de Santillan collectively provide a good overall picture of the incidents, the social context, and the motives of the terrorists. A dramatic, at times lurid, but not inaccurate account of Anarchist terrorism appears in Barbara W. Tuchman’s The Proud Tower (New York, 1966). F. Tarrida del Marmol’s Les Inquisiteurs d’Espagne (Paris, 1897), a work that aroused European public opinion against the barbarous methods of the Barcelona police, is still the best account of anti-Anarchist repressio’n during this period.

The reawakening of the Spanish labor movement in the decade prior to the formation of the CNT is very well documented. Stanley G. Payne’s The Spanish Revolution (New York, 1970) contains an excellent bibliography of contemporary works on the subject, many of which go beyond the scope of this volume. Abad de Santillan’s history covers the period in some detail and Brenan’s chapter on the “Catalan Question, 1898–1909” provides a go’od political background. The finest account of the Barcelona labor movement during this decade is Joan Connelly Ullman’s The Tragic Week (Cambridge, 1968), a superbly researched and immensely informative work. The conventional attitude toward the “Tragic Week” appears in Augusto Riera’s La Semana Tragica (Barcelona, 1909), complete with photographs and inventories of gutted churches, monasteries, and seminaries. Diaz del Moral provides a detailed account of the agrarian movement in Cordoba between 1900 and 1909 and Malefakis devotes several highly informative pages to the reemergence of rural Anarchist agitation in Andalusia generally during the upsurge of 1903–1904.

An ample literature exists on Francisco Ferrer’s career and death, including highly informative material in Joan Connelly Ullman’s book. Ferrer’s La Escuela Moderna has been translated into English by Joseph McCabe under the title, The Origin and Ideas of the Modem School (London, 1913), a work that has apparently undergone many reprints although the translation does not have a publishing history. This small volume presents a comprehensive statement of Ferrer’s pedagogic ideals and still deserves reading. A. and C. Orts-Ramos’s Francisco Ferrer—Apostal de la Razon (Barcelona, 1932) is a highly informative personal and intellectual biography. The Spanish Anarchists published a fair amount of material on Ferrer of which Hem Day’s F. Ferrer—sa vie, son oeuvre (Brussels, n.d.) is still available. English accounts’ of Ferrer include Francisco Ferrer: His Life, Work, and Martyrdom, edited by Leonard D. Abbott for the Francisco Ferrer Association (New York, n.d.), and McCabe’s The Martyrdom of Ferrer (London, 1909), both of which appeared shortly after Ferrer’s execution and reflect the worldwide impact of the Spanish educator.

To gain an insight into the cultural life fostered by Anarchist intellectuals during the closing decades of the last century, the reader must turn to periodicals such as La Revista Blanca (old series) and the earlier review, La Revista Social. Jose Peirats’s “Para una Monografia de Escritores Anarquistas Espanoles” in Ruta (Vol. Ill, No. 7,1972) is a good survey of Spanish Anarchist writers, their works, and the periodicals to which they contributed. The topical range of these intellectuals can be judged by examining Ricardo Mella’s Ideario (Gijon, 1926) and Ensayos y Conferencias (Gijon, 1934), both of which constitute Volumes One and Two respectively of the Obras Completas de Ricardo Mella.

The emergence of Anarchosyndicalism is ably discussed by Brenan in his chapter on the subject. The impact of Georges Sorel’s Reflexions sur la Violence (originally published in Paris, 1908, and easily available in English translation) has been greatly overrated, but the work should be read as a characteristic response of many radical French intellectuals to the new workers’ movement. Despite its brevity, Daniel Guerin’s Anarchism (New York, 1970) is, in my view, the most trustworthy and perceptive recent survey of Anarchist ideas and history. It contains a good account of the pedigree and history of Anarchosyndicalism. Guerin’s compilation of Anarchist documents, Ni Dieu, Ni Maitre (Paris, n.d.), reproduces early anticipations of syndicalist organization such as James Guillaume’s “Idees sur reorganization Sociale” (1876) and the explicitly end-of-the-century syndicalism reflected by Fernand Pelloutier’s “L’Anarchisme et les Syndicate Ouvriers” and Emile Pouget’s “Le Syndicat.” Roger Hagnauer’s L’Actualite de la Charte d‘Amiens (Paris, 1959) contains a succinct account of the emergence of the French CGT and its shift toward a Marxist-controlled labor union. Errico Malatesta’s criticisms of syndicalism appear in the Corrtpte Rendu Analytique of the Congres Anarchiste Tenu a Amsterdam, Aout 24–31, 1907 (Paris, 1908). The most definitive biography of Malatesta and the finest selection of his writings in English has been prepared by Vernon Richards under the title, Malatesta: His Life and Ideas (London, 1965).

4. From the Early CNT to the Second Republic (Chapters VIII-IX)

The early history and structure of the CNT are discussed in detail in the historical works of Brenan, Buenacasa, Abad de Santillan, and Garcia Venero. Jose Peirats’s What is the CNT? (London, 1972), the English translation of an article in Ruta, gives a description of the organization’s structure and goals as well as general background material. A brief but useful account of the events leading to the formation of the CNT appears in Peirats’s Los Anarquistas en la Crisis Politica Espanola. The greater part of this book deals with the confederation’s activities under the Primo dictatorship, the formation and role of the FAI, and the conflicts within Spanish Anarchosyndicalism during the Second Republic. Cesar M. Lorenzo also provides a survey of Anarchosyndicalist activities during this period, although the book deals mainly with the Civil War.

The most informative English account of Anarchist activities between the World War I period and the Primo dictatorship is Gerald H. Meaker’s The Revolutionary Left in Spain, 1914–1923 (Stanford, 1974), a work that deals equally with the Socialists at this time and the Communist tendencies that emerged from the Russian Revolution. Meaker is not sympathetic to the Anarchists, but his study is meticulously researched and highly perceptive. Diaz del Moral and Malefakis’s accounts are indispensable to an understanding of the rural movement. For a detailed account of the “Bellas Artes” congress of the CNT, see the Congreso de Constitution de la Confederation National del Trabajo (CNT), Ediciones “CNT” (Toulouse, 1959) and for the 1918 Barcelona congress see the Memoria del Congreso celebrado en Barcelona los dias 28, 29 y 30 de Junio y 1 de Julio de 1918, Ediciones “CNT” (Toulouse, 1957).

Detailed accounts of the strike movement during this period appear in Alberto Bacells’s El Sindicalismo en Barcelona (1916–1923) (Barcelona, 1965)-, Jacinto Martin Maestre’s Huelga General de 1917 (Madrid, 1966), Garcia Venero’s Historia Movimientos Sindicalistas Espanoles (1840–1933), Angel Pestana’s Lo que Aprendi en la Vida (Madrid, 1933), and Francisco Largo Caballero’s Mis Reciierdos (Mexico, 1954). Most of the overall accounts of Spanish radicalism, such as Brenan’s and Abad de Santillan’s, contain valuable accounts of their own.

Bacells also provides a comprehensive survey of the pistolerismo tendency that plagued the postwar years. Buenacasa’s account provides an example of the reaction of a distinguished Anarchist militant to the damage pistolerismo inflicted on the CNT. The reader who is interested in this phase of Spanish Anarchosyndicalism may care to consult Maria Farre Morego’s Los Atentados Sociales en Espana (Madrid, 1922) and Miguel Sastre y Sama’s La Esclavitud Modema (Barcelona, 1921). The foregoing works represent only a fraction of the very considerable contemporary literature on the period, most notably on the strikes and the pistoleros.

Brenan, Raymond Carr, Buenacasa, Abad de Santillan, and Peirats’s historical works provide highly informative accounts of the period leading into and including the Primo dictatorship. A laudatory compilation of material on Salvador Segui by a variety of libertarian writers has been prepared by Ediciones “Solidaridad Obrera” under the title Salvador Segui: su vida, su obra (Paris, 1960). Meaker also discusses Segui’s policies in detail. An excellent account of the conflict between various tendencies within the CNT during this period appears in George Breitman’s Spanish Anarcho-Syndicalism, 1918–1931: Moderates vs. Extremists (University of Michigan, unpublished paper, 1969). Ricardo Sanz provides a personal account of the Solidarios and Nosotros affinity groups in El Sindicalismo y La Politico (Toulouse, 1966), an account that is filled out by personal interviews with Anarchist grupi’s tas and militants in Abel Paz’s Durruti: Le Peuple en Armes (Paris, 1972). The Paz biography, perhaps the most informative account of Durruti’s life available, has been translated into English by Nancy MacDonald and is scheduled for publication by Black Rose Books in Montreal in 1977.

Meaker’s book and Peirats’s Los Anarquistas . .. contain valuable accounts of the fortunes of Spanish Anarchism as the CNT slipped into illegality under the Primo dictatorship. Angel Pestana’s report oi his visit to Russia has been published in recent years as two pamphlets by Editorial ZYX under the titles, Informe de mi Estanda en la U.R.S.S. (Madrid, 1968) and Considerations y Juitios Acerca de la Tercera International (Madrid, 1968). Breitman chronicles the disputes that emerged in the CNT during the dictatorship and up to the expulsion of the Treintistas with a great deal of understanding and perception. One of the most detailed accounts of these conflicts appears in John Brademas’s Anarcosindicalismo y Revolution en Espana (1930–1937) (Barcelona, 1974), a modified version of Brademas’s highly informative doctoral dissertation, “Revolution and Social Revolution: A Contribution to the History of the Anarcho-Syndicalist Movement in Spain, 1930–1937” (Oxford University, unpublished, 1956). The record of the special CNT congress in 1931, Memorias de Congreso Extraordinario de la C.N.T. celebrado en Madrid los Dias 11 al 16 de ]unio de 1931 (Barcelona, 1931), contains a remarkable account of the vicissitudes of the confederation during the closing years of the dictatorship.

Peirats in Los Anarquistas ... has an amusing account of the founding meeting of the FAI in Valencia but the most detailed narrative appears in Brademas’s book as a lengthy memorandum written for the author by Miguel Jimenez, who presided at the conference. I also received colorful details of the preparation and course of this meeting from Gaston Leval and Jose Peirats, but limitations of space did not make it possible for me to include them in this volume. The best discussion I have encountered of the structure of the FAI appears in Ildefonso Gonzalez’s II Movimiento Libertario Spagnuolo (Naples, n.d.), selections of which were generously translated for my use from the Italian into English by Sam Dolgoff. Unfortunately, this very important survey does not as yet appear in any other language.

5. The Road to Revolution

Brenan’s discussion of the period from 1931 to 1936 is still the finest general account of the Second Republic. Gabriel Jackson’s The Spanish Republic and the Civil War, 1931–1939 (Princeton, 1965) is very useful and provides many details that are not ordinarily available in general histories, although I share Noam Chomsky’s criticisms of the book in his The Cold War and the New Mandarins. Hugh Thomas’s The Spanish Civil War (New York, 1961)—a book that, for some curious reason, has acquired the reputation of being a “definitive” history of the conflict—is pretentious, superficial, and factually unreliable. For a devastating critique of Thomas’s oeuvre, the reader should consult Vernon Richards’s “July 19, 1936: Republic or Revolution?” in Anarchy, No. 5 (Juty/1961), and Richards’s introductory remarks to Gaston Leval’s Collectives in the Spanish Revolution (London, 1975).

The best account of Spanish Anarchism from 1931 to 1936 is Brademas’s already cited dissertation and its modified translation in book form into Spanish. The opening chapters (I to IX) of Peirats’s La C.N.T. en la Revolution Espanola, Vol. I (Buenos Aires, 1955), are indispensable for a knowledge of Anarchist activities during the period. The volume consists in large part, of documents that are important in clarifying the vicissitudes of Anarchist policy. The reader will also obtain a good survey of the events leading up to the Civil War and an excellent account of the opening days of the conflict from Pierre Broue and Emile Temime’s The Revolution and the Civil War in Spain (Cambridge, 1970), a translation from the French of one of the better general accounts of the Spanish Civil War. Certainly this volume should be read in preference to Thomas’s volume. Malefakis’s study of agrarian unrest in the early 1930s is immensely informative, although it is definitely unsympathetic to the Anarchists and, in its conclusion, to the Liberals. One encounters an even more marked rightist bias in Stanley Payne’s The Spanish Revolution (New York, 1970), but the book is so well-researched and so highly informative that it makes for good reading. Salvador de Madariaga’s Spain (New York, 1958) presents a liberal interpretation of the period and of the conflicts between the UGT and CNT.

Buenacasa’s La C.N.T., los Treinta y la F.A.I. (Barcelona, 1933) presents the outlook of the FAI in the dispute with the CNT moderates by a leader who is by no means a spokesman for its most extreme wing. Pestana’s memoir, Lo que Aprendi ... should also be consulted to gain the views of one of the ablest CNT leaders. Peirats’s historical works provide good accounts of the ciclo de las insurrecdones and Manuel Villar’s El Anarquismo y la Insurrection de Asturias (Buenos Aires, 1936) presents the Anarchist version of the Asturian uprising. Although most of Gaston Leval’s Collectives in the Spanish Revolution deals with the Civil War period, Part One of the book provides a first-rate libertarian analysis of the agrarian situation prior to the revolution.

The record of the Saragossa congress of May 1936 has been republished by Ediciones “CNT” as part of its series Prolegomenos de la Revolution de ]ulio en Espana under the title, El Congreso Confederal de Zaragoza (n.p., 1955). The reader should also consult Isaac Puente’s El Comunismo Libertario (republished at Toulouse, 1947), a work which formed the basic theoretical document for the congress’s discussion of the future society. My choice of Diego Abad de Santillan’s El Organismo Eamomico de la Revolution (Barcelona, 1936), translated into English under the title, After the Revolution (New York, 1937), as the most useful of the two works was guided by the need for a more discursive treatment. Puente’s pamphlet, despite its influence, is scarcely more than a brief outline; Santillan’s book is a reflective theoretical work as well as an informative guide to social reconstruction.

Accounts of opening days of the revolution are very numerous. I have already singled out Broue and Temime’s survey of the uprising in the major cities of Spain. One of the most detailed accounts of the day-by-day conflict in Madrid and Barcelona appears in Abel Paz’s Paradigma de una Revolution (n.p., n.d.), published by Ediciones “ATT,” the concluding portion of which contains appeals in Solidaridad Obrera from July 19 to July 23, 1936. Portions of S. Canovas Cervantes’s Durruti y Ascaso: La C.N.T. y la Revolution de fulio, published by Ediciones “Paginas Libres” (Toulouse, n.d.), deal with the uprising ij^ Barcelona. An assessment of the events leading to the revolution and actual outbreak of the Civil War by one of the most influential Anarchist “statesmen” of the period will be found in Diego Abad de Santillan’s Por que Perdimos la Guerra (Buenos Aires, 1940), the opening chapters of which provide an account of the development of the Spanish Anarchist movement from the First to the Second Republic and the outbreak of the July uprising. For a sharp criticism by an English Anarchist of the FAI and CNT’s performance on the eve of the uprising as well as the Civil War, see Vernon Richard’s The Lessons of the Spanish Revolution (London, 1953).

Note on Sources

The greater part of this volume was completed in 1970 and I did not have the benefit of any volumes cited above that were published after 1969. Accordingly, I could not use the later volumes of Abad de Santillan’s Contribution a la Historia de Movimiento Obrero Espanol, Josef Termes’s Anarquismo y Sindicalismo en Espana, Clara E. Lida’s Anarquismo y Revolution en la Espana del XIX and her accompanying volume of documents, Dolgoff and Lehning’s compilations of Bakunin’s writings, Edward Malefakis’s Agrarian Reform and Peasant Revolution in Spain, Gerald Meaker’s The Revolutionary Left in Spain, Abel Paz’s Durruti: Le Peuple en Armes, and the Spanish version of John Brademas’s dissertation except insofar as they contained material that applied to the concluding chapter, “The Road to Revolution.”

Wherever possible, however, these volumes were used to correct errors and, to a limited extent, expand accounts of events for which there was little available data.

Nearly all the remaining works cited in this “Bibliographical Essay” entered into the preparation of this volume. The discussion on the early history of the International in Spain relies heavily on Anselmo Lorenzo’s memoirs, Nettlau’s accounts of the early Spanish Anarchists, Marti, Garcia Venero, and Diaz del Moral. Buenacasa, Joan Connelly Ullman, Peirats, Bacells, and the various biographies, memoirs, and documents mentioned in the bibliographical essay should be singled out as major sources of the later events described in this book. I consulted many conventional periodicals of the day, including contemporary newspapers in Spanish, English, and French, which cast light on fairly obscure periods in the history of the Spanish Anarchist movement. I also had the benefit of individual issues of La Revista Blanca, Solidaridad Obrera, and Tierra y Libertad in American libraries and private collections.