Published by Chuck on 30 Jan 2007
Los Organismos Revolucionarios: El Comité Central de las Milicias Antifascistas de Cataluña
The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 shattered illusions across the political spectrum. The fascists, who assumed that they would take the country easily, were held back by the fierce popular resistance to their attempted coup. The Popular Front government, which had thought that it could make Spain a cosmopolitan social democracy, barely survived the attacks on its legitimacy originating from its left and right flanks. And the anarchists, who had been fighting the state for decades, suddenly found that they held power in significant areas of the Peninsula.
This was a tremendous paradox for the anarchists and one which they were ill-equipped to confront. Anti-statists on principle, they rejected the very idea of governance and yet their centrality to the anti-fascist resistance in the first days of the war meant that they exercised de facto rule in parts of the rearguard and the front. There was an immediate draw toward statecraft, a pull only strengthened by the likely need to fight an extended war against the fascists and to transform the economy that had dropped into their hands.
One way that they attempted to resolve this was by participating in the Central Committee of Anti-fascist Militias, which was not exactly a government (but certainly much more than a “committee”). This body was vital to Spain’s revolutionary and military equilibrium since its inception on July 20, 1936 until its dissolution approximately two months later.
The following article by Juan García Oliver describes the formation and activity of the Central Committee of Anti-fascist Militias. Previously unavailable on the Internet, it is one of the few first-hand accounts of the institution. His piece is a chapter in a book titled De julio a Julio: un año de lucha, which Tierra y Libertad press published in 1937. I intend to translate it into English in the near future.