SPAIN'S QUIXOTIC ANARCHISTS

...At the peak of its strength in 1936, half of the Spanish working class—some 1.5 million people—belonged to the CNT...

...It would represent an enormous potential for the CNT, and no government will calmly give such a potential to the anarchists...

...Understand...

...And he rooted out all the educational, cultural, and political traditions of the vanquished...

...At first about seventy workers were in Workers Commissions and as many in the UGT...

...Autos painted with the socialist symbol—the rose in a fist— sped along the streets, drivers and passengers chanting "Felipe presidente...

...Nobody can have one in Spain today because there is no tradition9 The CNT itself is organized from the bottom up, and all representatives may be recalled by the members at any moment...

...This prevents formation of any sort of union bureaucracy, which the anarchists believe would corrupt the union...

...They later lost the World War...

...The anarchist or "libertarian communist" society would function without a state, without a political party, most emphatically without a dictatorship of the proletariat...

...Though the old caudillo had been dead for seven years, this was the real end of Francoism...

...Lawyers for the anarchist union recently drew up and delivered to the government a formal demand that the CNT be paid about $20 million as compensation for the seizure and subsequent use of about 150 buildings...

...While maintaining a ferocious struggle against Franco...

...No officer is paid, not even the secretary-general...

...There must be years of education and practical experience...

...It is forty years of franquismo...

...Most of its members are past fifty or not yet twenty-five...

...The greatest influence in the union is held by the most extreme ones...

...In the heady days following the 1977 legalization, tens of thousands of workers, students, and intellectuals rushed to take out CNT cards...

...So the CNT—whose members once strolled by the thousands in triumph down Barcelona's pedestrian artery, the Ramblas, with rifles over their shoulders and red-and-black kerchiefs around their necks, while loudspeakers blared revolutionary music—is trying to start from scratch, and is finding the going extremely tough...

...But the majority of that remarkable generation—the Spanish Left of the 1930s—were neither socialists nor communists...

...They are old—seventy, seventy-five, eighty years old—and they will die soon...

...George Orwell, so moved by the times that he wound up in the trenches alongside those militiamen, wrote of the situation in Barcelona, "There was much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for...

...Definitely agreed...

...If you accuse the anarchists of living in a world of make-believe, they reply that their dream became reality in 1936...

...Their militia fought bravely and their leaders helped pilot the short-lived Spanish Republic...

...It had a deeply ingrained resistance to the material aspects of modern civilization...

...If man wants to assume control of his own destiny and end the exploitation of man by man, this is what anarchism still has to offer...

...When Franco seized power, he ushered Spain down the industrial road, accomplishing at least superficial modernization...

...The companeros who are with us now have much more experience and understanding of the CNT and the possibilities we have...

...It was the long-awaited return of the Spanish Left...

...Spain's Quixotic Anarchists BY LAWRENCE ROBERTS Long after the jubilant crowds deserted the main plazas, you could hear the horns honking through the night in Spanish cities from Catalonia to Andalusia...

...What ever happened to theml Four flights up a poorly lit stairwell in a cluttered neighborhood of bargain shops between Barcelona's busy port and the dense maze of the Gothic quarter, a red-and-black emblem on the door confirms that you have found the regional headquarters of the Confederacion Nacional del Tra-bajo...

...Not in the short term but in the medium term...

...There is no strategy...

...Bondia, a thirty-four-year-old metalworker at the IBM factory in Madrid, says the CNT has between 30,000 and 40,000 members around the country, almost half in the Barcelona area and many others who are agricultural laborers in Andalusia...

...We are optimistic...

...But the ones who disaffiliate, clearly they are not joining the CNT, they are discontented and they say all unions are the same...

...The union has to deal with a changed situation...

...On Sundays they pack a tortilla de patatas and drive to the country...

...The CNT alone, alone, alone, without communists, without socialists, without anyone...

...The CNT also suffers from an age gap...

...It also had a long tradition of hatred for a corrupt state, and a history of working-class solidarity...

...The split, similar to other schisms in the CNT's past, also involved rejection of the continuing influence of the clandestine FAI (Federacion Anarquista Iberica), consisting of the most radical anarchists, some of whom recently were arrested on weapons charges...

...They keep the dream alive Then the assembly is over and it is never buenos noches or adios—which the anarchists disdain as bourgeois greetings—but always salud, salud amigo, as Spanish anarchists have been saying since the movement began a century ago...

...it finds itself in a drastically changed country and with greatly reduced influence...

...The CNT's past haunts it in many ways...

...It is a question of nostalgia...

...The biggest piece of unfinished business is the question of the CNT'spatrimonio, the union property seized by Franco...

...Yet there was a problem with this widely held historical view...

...In their smoky, well worn meeting hall, the companeros at a recent Barcelona workers' assembly—a gathering that is the heart of the CNT's structure—found themselves grappling with the status of the veteran CNT members still living in France...

...People now want to watch futbol or television...

...Our problem is very simple...

...Workers Commissions and the socialist UGT (Union General de Trabaj adores) are the largest unions in Spain today, but they too are suffering from declining influence...

...If we recouped the patrimonio," he says, "it would solve our economic problems for many years...

...No, we have won...

...The Spain that was fertile ground for the anarchist movement was a Spain of small industry and an almost feudal countryside...

...The Barcelona leaders can contemplate this easily with a glance out their windows at the consumer frenzy in the streets below, where shoppers scurry to buy digital watches, tape recorders, and transistor radios...

...They have a right to be part of the union where they struggled for many years...

...There has been no government response so far, and Bondia, for one, is not optimistic about an early settlement...

...Their successes in Barcelona, Catalonia, and much of Ara-gon and Andalusia gave them the military and political upper hand in those regions, Lawrence Roberts is an American journalist living in Spain...

...Or should they form a new French CNT...

...Therefore, the CNT is not only the vehicle but also a model for the future society...

...Italy and Germany...

...There are three in the CNT...

...But the anarchists, weakened by internal struggles in the antifascist camp, were first suppressed by the ever-stronger communists and then crushed by Franco's victorious forces...

...By 1939, most CNT members had been shot, jailed, or exiled...

...The CNT is the anarchist union that once led Spain into a social and political eruption unseen since the Paris Commune and the Russian Revolution...

...Those within the CNT find the reasons for weakness elsewhere...

...Nobody can have a strategy in Spain today because there is no tradition...

...The generation in between was recruited en masse into the communist-dominated Workers Commissions by militants who organized within the official state unions during the late Franco years...

...True enough, the socialists played an important role in the Spanish Civil War...

...Everywhere they called it the end of an era...

...Since then, however, many have left the fold, disappointed at what they found...

...In my factory, where we make scales for grocery stores, there are about 200 workers," explains a Barcelona CNT worker named Fernando...

...There is no point in trying to telephone or visit a CNT office before 7 p.m...

...These socialists no longer sang "The Internationale," of course, or raised their fists, or talked much of nationalization...

...Today, many anarchists in Spain question whether a trade union still can be the means to a libertarian society in a complex world...

...The Spanish revolution found itself alone, alone, alone," growls Paz, slapping the table in his favorite bodega for emphasis...

...We defended ourselves as best we could...

...But the CNT militants say such problems and disputes are to be expected in the normal rebirth of their organization...

...About the possible coup d'etat nothing, nothing, they do not ask anything...

...With large numbers of militants shot in the streets...

...The CNT was silent in Spain for three decades...

...We have a mountain of companeros working and obviously we are not going to see the fruits tomorrow night...

...Now four or five are in Workers Commissions and another seven in the UGT...

...Nevertheless, they were the political descendants of the men and women driven out of Spain more than forty years ago...

...But some of the most important problems are always the same— that man continues to be diminished by the force of the state, by the force of capital, and by the force of politics...

...There appears to be widespread dissatisfaction with the unions' performance in Spain's economic crisis, which has seen unemployment topping 17 per cent...

...And it is not true...

...Should they be a branch of the Spanish CNT, and be permitted to mix their concerns with those of the younger Spaniards...

...All production and distribution, education, health care, and transport would be organized by the "free association" of workers, artisans, and technicians...

...And the truth is, we did not really lose...

...When Franco's army rebelled against the Popular Front government that year to set off the Civil War, CNT militants were in the forefront of the counterattack...

...I believe that in five years, hombre, perhaps the CNT will not have half a million members, but it will have a much greater importance...

...But we are here...

...Paz, who returned only recently from exile in France, does not want to hear about what other historians see as the anarchists' mistakes...

...Yes, we won...

...And it remained during thirty-two months alone...

...With that 1936 look in his eyes, Fernando adds, "Before, there was no car, or television, and it must have been easier to explain libertarian communism to the workers...

...Several branches have split with the main CNT and compete with other trade unions in factory elections...

...they sign on to a way of life and to a deep faith that a new world can be built in which no human being will exploit another...

...We cannot solve the current problems in society the same way we tried to solve them in 1936...

...Even beyond the surface similarities, the CNT retains the ideology of the old days, anarcho-syndicalism, the faith that anarchism can be achieved through a revolutionary trade union...

...This is a victory for him...

...Anarchist militia paid by the factories set out exultantly for the front to battle the military rebels...

...Many who entered the CNT in 1977 did not understand very well what the CNT was," says Secretary-General Bondia...

...they were anarchists...

...To the dismay of the rest of the Left, it opposes voting and will not take part in political elections or union elections endorsed by the government...

...Franco dies, all the political parties and unions are legalized again, no one is praising Franco anymore, he has disappeared...

...There is no staff...

...it managed to reorganize secretly in the late 1960s, and at last was legalized in 1977, two years after the dictator's death...

...Supply committees sprang up to move food to the cities and goods to the countryside...

...Can the basic issues still be fought and solved in the workplace...

...In hundreds of rural towns, the peasants and laborers seized control and property...

...One of the problems in organizing is that there is no strategy...

...In thirty-two months we created a different world," says Abel Paz, an anarchist historian and writer who was a fifteen-year-old CNT factory worker when the Civil War broke out...

...Its members do not simply join a union...

...This is a tricky business for anarchists who believe in revolutionary expropriation, but most in the CNT see it as one way to seek redress for the wrongs inflicted by Franco...

...Most of the people who took out their trade union membership cards took it up as sort of a historical nostalgia," says Salvador G., a forty-six-year-old Basque, CNT intellectual, and Barcelona bookstore owner...

...It was October 28,1982, and the Spanish Socialist Workers Party, led by forty-year-old labor lawyer Felipe Gonzalez, had swept the national election...

...There are few of us left, it is true...

...Spontaneously, as anarchist theorists always claimed and hoped would happen, factories, hospitals, shops, public transport, and department stores were collectivized in the cities...

...The historical tradition was broken by Franco, and until you have a tradition of dealing with common problems— which is very different from reading about them—you can't have a strategy...

...Officials estimate that slightly more than 10 per cent of Spanish workers hold union cards, and that far fewer are active members...

...They are trying to steer the union through a difficult period, when it must come to terms with its history in order to begin looking to the future...

...About problems, conflict, they want to know nothing...

...and they proceeded to make their utopian revolution...

...During forty years of franquismo, the working class lost much of its historical memory," says Jose Bondia, current national secretary-general of the CNT...

...In his view, the revolution collapsed only because the fascist powers were aiding Franco and because the Soviet Union demanded the suppression of the anarchists as the price of aid to the antifascist side...

...Let us not fool ourselves, friends," exhorted a metalworkers' representative with an uncanny resemblance to Ed Asner...

...union work is voluntary, and thus begins after the regular workday ends...

...To arrive at this goal, the CNT endorses education through direct action, general strikes, and sabotage...

...Franco held power for forty years, but the world recognizes that we had forty years of backwardness...

...Today, this anarchist union is a bit like Rip Van Winkle...

...The militants still in it are young, fairly new to the process, and fairly immature...

...Who defeated us militarily...

...In the opinion of Heribert Bar-rera, a former CNT member who is now president of the Catalonian parliament, "The CNT has a very reduced importance because it has not absorbed the realities of today's world...