Zabalaza #14 - Building a mass anarchist movement: the
example of Spain's CNT by Thabang Sefalafala and Lucien van der
Walt (ZACF)* (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
The ideas of anarchism have often been misunderstood, or sidelined. A proliferation of
studies, such as Knowles' Political Economy from Below, Peirats' Anarchists in the Spanish
Revolution, and others, have aimed to address this problem - and also to show that
anarchism can never be limited to an ideology merely to keep professors and students busy
in debating societies. ---- Anarchists have been labeled "utopians" or regarded as
catalysts of chaos and violence, as at the protests in Seattle, 1999, against the World
Trade Organization. However, anarchism has a constructive core and an important history as
a mass movement - including in its syndicalist (trade union) form. It rejects the
authoritarianism and totalitarianism often associated with Marxist regimes, and seeks to
present a living alternative to classical Marxism, social democracy and the current
neo-liberal hegemonic order. It rejects both the versions of Marxism that have justified
massive repression, and the more cautious versions, like that of Desai in his book Marx's
Revenge, which claim that a prolonged capitalist stage - with all its horrors - remains
essential before socialism can be attempted. It rejects the ideas that exploitation and
oppression are "historical necessities" for historical progress.
The history of anarchism and syndicalism shows that the contrary is true. One of the
crucial themes highlighted by recent works in this tradition is that the construction of a
mass anarchist and syndicalist movement based on anarchist principles of
anti-authoritarianism, equality, freedom, liberty, justice, and democracy is possible -
and is something of which ordinary working class and poor people are perfectly capable.
This is wonderfully demonstrated by the anarcho-syndicalist CNT (the National
Confederation of Labour) of Spain. It was formed in 1910 in Barcelona, in the Catalonia
province of Spain - the country's industrial hub. The CNT emerged out of difficult social,
political and economic conditions that characterised Spain, and grew, despite severe
repression, into the 1930s. Embodying the central anarchist principles of individual
freedom, cooperation, and democracy, the CNT became the most powerful union - and mass -
movement in the country.
Spain was marked by high level of inequality, and a social system that favored the elite;
a rightwing Church often operated as an institution of oppression, as did the state. The
activities by the CNT were heavily repressed through armed force. State power was
continually used to smash working class and peasant resistance; this was essential for the
ruling class to maintain their privileges.
Despite these conditions - and in contradistinction to the notion that repression,
authority, exploitation, crippling poverty, hunger and misery, as well as wealth and power
for people numbering no more than the fingers on one hand, are necessary evils - the CNT
provided a practical example of ordinary human beings possessing profound capacities and
intelligence. It built a mass union movement that defended and advanced workers'
conditions, that educated millions of people in an alternative worldview, that worked
alongside communities against evictions and for lower rents, and that allied with working
class, the peasant youth and women fighting for the anarchist cause.
Through its structures, its militancy, its education and its alliances, the CNT helped
develop and nurture, on a mass scale, the capacities and innate intelligence of the masses
- capacities and intelligence that nullified the need for mastery of the many by an elite.
This was demonstrated most dramatically in the 1930s, when the CNT (and the allied
Anarchist Federation of Iberia, the FAI, an anarchist political organization linked to it)
launched or supported a series of popular rebellions. In 1936, the CNT and FAI helped stop
a military coup, unleashing a massive and profound social revolution that saw millions of
hectares of land, and vast parts of industry and services placed under worker and
community control. Often governed through CNT structures, the "collectives" were
self-managed, highly efficient, and rejected the logic of production for profit; they
moved towards the implementation of the maximum programme of anarchist communism.
Unfortunately, failures by the CNT and FAI stalled this programme, and opened the door to
its defeat.
That said, the CNT's experience from the 1910s to the 1930s highlights the reality that we
are, at this current conjuncture, in fact settling for far less than human beings are
capable of creating. It is in the hands of ordinary people to remake the world. This
should be remembered in movement building: the CNT model that, following in the footsteps
of anarchist luminary Mikhail Bakunin, insisted crisply that "Future social organization
must be made solely from the bottom upwards, by the free association or federation of
workers," first local, then finally, "in a great federation, international and universal,"
embracing all suffering humanity, and capable of re-making the world into one based on
social justice, equality and freedom.
*Writing in their personal capacity
http://zabalaza.net/2015/10/02/building-a-mass-anarchist-movement-the-example-of-spains-cnt/
