Commune of Paris-Permanence of sectional assemblies -- Distrust of executive power -- Local power necessary to carry out Revolution -- National Assembly tries to lessen power of districts -- Municipal law of May -- June 1790 -- Impotence of attacks of Assembly -- Municipal law ignored -- Sections the center of revolutionary initiative -- Civic committees -- Increasing power of sections -- Charity-bureaux and charity workshops administered by sections -- Cultivation of waste land Our contemporaries have allowed themselves to be so won over to ideas of subjection to the centralized State that the very idea of communal independence-to call it "autonomy" would not be enough-which was current in 1789, seems arrange nowadays. M. L. Foubert,1 when speaking of the scheme of municipal organization decreed by the National assembly on May 21, 1790, was quite right in saying that "the application of this scheme wou...
The Anarchist and Syndicalist Revolution of 1936Preface These essays are less an analysis of the Spanish Revolution and Civil War of 1936-39 than an evocation of the greatest proletarian and peasant revolution to occur over the past two centuries. Although they contain a general overview and evaluation of the Anarchist and Anarchosyndicalist movements (the two should be clearly distinguished) in the three-year struggle at the end of the 1930s, they are not intended to be a full account of those complex events. It is no exaggeration to say that the Spanish Revolution was the farthest-reaching movement that the Left ever produced, for reasons the essays that follow will make clear. The Spanish proletariat and peasantry, led largely by Anarchist militants whose names will never be known to us, strained the limits of what we in the 1930s called "proletarian socialism" and went appreciably beyond them. Far more than the leaders of the Anarchosyndicalist National Confederation of Labor and the Iberian Anarchist Fede...