The CNT, money, and the Spanish Revolution
Lessons on organising for a moneyless society
This article was written for the French anarchist magazine Alternative Libertaire.
Socialists have long recognised money as a critical tool in the arsenal of capital. Money does not only regulate the process of commodity exchange but also regulates social relationships ensuring the subservience of workers and leading to atomisation, alienation, and fetishization. It is no wonder, then, that the abolition of money has become a priority for many socialist movements and thinkers. Writing on the limitations of the trade union movement, Karl Marx warned unions from becoming “exclusively absorbed” in the day to day “guerilla fights” against the “never ceasing encroachments of capital or changes of the market”. Instead, he argued that unions should “inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword: “Abolition of the wages system!””.[1] These instructions were adhered to by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) who integrated Marx’s warning into the preamble to their 1905 constitution, a preamble that has remained largely unchanged until today. Less than 30 years after Marx’s statement, Peter Kropotkin clarified that the abolition of the wage system should not mean its replacement with another form of accounting such as labour vouchers, which would require centralisation and coercion to maintain. Rather, it should liberate labour and its products towards a free system of exchange based on their ability and needs.[2]
While there is general agreement among socialists on the need to abolish the monetary system, there are sparse historical examples of this being done successfully. For example, the Paris Commune of 1871 did not abolish money but ensured that all officials were paid at the same rate of the average worker. The Russian Revolution of 1917, despite its claims of an immediate implementation of socialism, not only held on to the wage system but developed a system of status stratification based on wages and rations that was more complex than any under capitalism.[3] Revolutionary theories which include the abolishment of money are equally limited; they tend to treat the goal either as a fait accompli once the larger revolutionary objective of overthrowing the state is met, or as an end goal to be achieved once the state has “withered away”.[4]
The aim of this article is to look at the complexities of abolishing money through the case of the Spanish Revolution of 1936 and its main protagonist, the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT — National Confederation of Labour). While the Spanish Revolution, and the history of the CNT within it, is expansive, the article first summarises the CNT’s stance on money and its abolition, and how this was carried into practice during the revolution. The article then explains how the CNT’s moneyless collectives were undermined by the central government which maintained control over financial institutions. This was facilitated by the CNT’s neglect to organise workers in these sectors before the revolution. The article ends by drawing lessons from the Spanish case and argues that revolutionary theory should approach the question of money through a parallel approach.
The CNT emerges as the leader of the Spanish Revolution
The Spanish Revolution should be understood as the culmination of a long-term “protest spiral”[5] where opposing groups (the church, army, and landlords on one side, and organised labour on the other) mutually radicalised each other until a final struggle for domination emerged. This final struggle took the form of the failed coup turned civil war instigated by General Francisco Franco in July 1936. While the failed coup is taken as the starting point of the revolution, the groundwork for it was laid out by a series of armed insurrections, the most prominent of which took place in January 1933 (led by the CNT) and August 1934 (called by the socialist party and supported by the CNT).
These insurrections provided the CNT with practical experience in waging revolution. In May 1936, a few months before the failed coup, the CNT summarised its theoretical position on revolution and the type of society it would establish in a motion passed at its national conference titled the confederal concept of libertarian communism.[6] The motion also summarised the CNT’s stance on money and argues, quite paradoxically, that while the rules of production and exchange will be managed by the concept of “from each based on their ability to each according to their need”, there remains a need for “production cards” which will contain “a record of the value of the day’s work that the holder has performed”. This conflicting presentation is most likely due to the pluralistic nature of the CNT and the various preferences of its rural and industrial sections, differences which would become tangible after Franco’s failed coup.
Franco’s Coup began in Spanish Morocco on the 17th of July 1936. Until the 21st of July, various garrisons throughout Spain participated in his rebellion. Some successfully took control of the cities and regions they were based in, others remained loyal to the Republic, and some were defeated by armed workers who stormed army garrisons and redistributed weapons among themselves forming union-based militias. The calamity of the failed coup meant that the Spanish central government lost effective control of its coercive apparatus leaving armed organised workers, with the CNT at its head, dominating post-coup Spain. [7]
As part of their resistance to the coups, workers took over one-third of all rural land in Republican Spain, representing two-thirds of cultivated land, and organised themselves into collectives. [8] They also took over all sorts of factories including heavy industry, textiles, and wares, utilities, transport, and commercial functions including international import and export. Workers took over and managed 80 percent of firms in Catalonia, 60 percent in the Levante, and 30 percent in Madrid. [9] These collectives were run by revolutionary committees which practiced legislative and executive powers while also carrying out forms of popular justice.[10] Committees were structured on a proportional basis based on the distribution of union membership among the workers.
In rural collectives, money was replaced by ration cards based on family size, allowing workers to freely access foodstuffs based on the number of members in their family.[11] Urban collectives implemented a system of producers’ cards where measures of output were interchangeable for supplies. In some collectives, however, salaries and the money system were maintained due to opposition to their abolishment by non-CNT members.[12] Even though wages were maintained, they were increased and a slew of benefits previously unavailable to workers, from days off to free medical care and spousal benefits were provided.
To help organise work on a national level, the CNT implemented national industrial federations (NIFs).[13] Rural collectives engaged in trade and barter with neighbouring cities and soon set up local, provincial, and regional federations.[14] The establishment of “libertarian communism” seemed at hand, but this initiative would soon be lost to the centralising tendency of the state.
The CNT’s neglect of financial institutions comes back to haunt them
While workers on the front line of the revolution quickly moved to organise the economy on new libertarian lines, the leadership of the CNT backed out of carrying the revolution to its logical conclusion and instead chose to join the central government. The CNT justified this decision by arguing that the state, understood as an apparatus of suppression in the service of capital, no longer exists. This would prove to be a major error.
The CNT received minor positions in what they called a “revolutionary government” leaving them unable to influence decisions. Despite its domination by the Socialist Party, the central government was more concerned with maintaining good relations with France, England, and Belgium by protecting their economic interests in Spain.[15] The government assumed that maintaining good ties was necessary to secure the arms they sorely needed to wage war against Franco. Pandering to the other Western European Democracies placed the central government in direct opposition to the autonomous workers’ collectives. To demonstrate its sovereign control over Republican-held territories, the government launched a campaign to bring collectives to heel through a process of legalisation and economic starvation.
This task was facilitated by CNT’s disregard for financial institutions. The CNT’s belief in the abolishment of money (either in favour of free exchange or labour vouchers) meant that they had failed to organise workers in financial institutions. Banks were left untouched in the wave of appropriations to which factories and land were subjected since it was assumed that they would play no role in the post-revolutionary society. Thus, while the collectives self-organised into NIFs, this was not enough to secure their autonomy in the long term. This is as self-sustainability was out of reach without the support of non-collectivised factories or towns or collectives under the control of the socialists and communists, all of which were under the influence of the state and opposed the CNT’s goal of autonomy. Additionally, the government quickly regained control over imports and exports meaning collectives could not bypass the government to engage in trade and secure the materials or equipment they needed to continue production.
Since it chose to join the government, the CNT made no effort to gain control of financial institutions or resources (apart from an abandoned plan concocted by one of the CNT militias stationed in Madrid to rob the government’s gold reserves,[16] the second largest in the world). Thus, with financial institutions firmly in the hand of the state, collectives were starved into submission. The revolutionary councils that managed them were slowly replaced with regular municipalities reporting to and controlled by the government. The process of legalisation of integration became the dominant feature of the revolution. It extended to union militias, neighbourhood police known as “control patrols”, and people’s courts were all brought within the control of the central government. The central government’s mismanagement of finances and resources would soon result in spiralling inflation in Republican-held areas,[17] poor quality of arms,[18] and eventually, defeat at the hands of Franco’s forces.
Lessons from the Spanish Revolution
What lessons can we draw from the Spanish case? Both the CNT’s decision to join the government and their dereliction on the question of transitioning to a moneyless society can be traced to a weakness in their revolutionary theory. As set out in their confederal concept of libertarian communism, the CNT did not account for the existence of multiple sovereignty during a revolutionary upheaval. In other words, the CNT miscalculated the fact that revolutions often produce multiple competing centres of power and do not result in an immediate transition of power from one party to another (even if this “party” seeks a decentralised and federalist distribution of power). The emergence of collectives in parallel to a central state apparatus left the CNT reluctant to fulfil their revolutionary goals as it meant directly confronting the remaining centres of power which were allied in the fight against Franco. Once the CNT decided to join the government, their previous disregard for organising within financial institutions provided the central government with a resource advantage over the collectives. This left the CNT without the leverage it needed to even preserve the revolutionary gains it had made in the early stages of the revolution.
Some authors[19] have argued that the main error made by the CNT was its refusal to complete its revolution. While taking this path would not have guaranteed a victory against Franco, at least it would have been more consistent with the CNT’s supposed aims. However, even if the CNT successfully overcame other centres of power, this does not automatically translate into the institution of a moneyless society, meaning their neglect of financial institutions would have still acted against them. While revolutions are domestic events, they must consider international dimensions and contexts. Even if an anarchist Spain would have emerged, it would have still been situated in an international capitalist state system, and money would still be necessary to engage in trade.
Additionally, the CNT’s conception of libertarian communism precludes the notion of compelling individuals into joining collectives or abandoning monetary exchange. Therefore, the CNT’s image of a post-revolutionary society includes the possibility of individuals remaining independent from the collective system. This was not a theoretical position. During the revolution, the CNT adopted resolutions providing individuals who did not want to join collectives access to their own plots of land.[20]
Do the above mean that the idea of establishing a moneyless society immediately after a revolution is impossible and an incrementalist approach should be taken? Not at all. Similar to the CNT’s stance on land distribution, any revolutionary theory that seeks to abolish the use of money should integrate a parallel understanding of systems. For example, it is useful to think of a moneyless post-revolutionary system to manage internal affairs, and a moneyed system to manage inter-state relationships or exchanges between individuals who have not joined the collective system. Needless to say, the development of these parallel systems should remain true to other values of the revolution, such as an absence of exploitation, a condition the CNT imposed on individual landholders.
Integrating a parallel approach into a revolutionary theory means that, contrary to the CNT’s approach to money, pre-revolutionary organising should not ignore financial institutions as arenas of contestation (or any institution that is presumed to become defunct in a post-revolutionary system). This may seem counterintuitive. The prefigurative nature of anarchism seeks to create means-end consistency, so why would a revolutionary organisation bother itself with institutions that will be defunct? To begin with, a parallel system means that these institutions will not become defunct, but their purpose and relationship to productive and social relations will transform through the revolutionary movement. Second, as revolutions often include multiple and competing centres of control, organising within these institutions, even if they do not, today, reflect their post-revolutionary role, means the denial of resources to competing centres of power. This does not mean a break with a means-end prefiguration, but a more complex understanding of the relationship between institutions and their transformative potential through revolutionary upheavals. Developing revolutionary theories that integrate parallel systems further and strengthen prefiguration rather than, as with the case of the CNT, lead to inconsistencies when confronted with a situation of multiple sovereignty.
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[1] Karl Marx, Value, Price, and Profit (1865). Available on: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/value-price-profit/index.htm
[2] Peter Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread (1892). Available on: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-the-conquest-of-bread
[3] Thomas Remington, Building Socialism in Bolshevik Russia (London: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1984), 139.
[4] Leon Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism (London: Verso, 2017), 140.
[5] George Lawson, Anatomies of Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 184.
[6] The text of the full resolution can be found at https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/the-confederal-concept-of-libertarian-communism
[7] Jose Peirats, The CNT in the Spanish Revolution: Volume 1 (Hastings: The Meltzer Press, 2001), 131.
[8] Robert Alexander, The Anarchists in the Spanish Civil War (London: Janus Publishing Company Limited, 1999), 326.
[9] Ibid., 463.
[10] Ibid., 332; Stuart Christie, We, the Anarchists! (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2002), 186; Hugh Thomas, “Anarchist agrarian collectives in the Spanish civil war”, in The Republic and the Civil War in Spain, ed. R. Carr. (Palgrave: London, 1971), 240; Burnett Bolloten, The Spanish Civil War: Revolution and counterrevolution (London: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 65–66.
[11] Alexander, 329; Thomas, 250.
[12] Alexander, 533.
[13] Jose Peirats, The CNT in the Spanish Revolution: Volume 2 (Hastings: Christie Books, 2005), 32.
[14] Alexander, 329.
[15] Bolloten, 227.
[16] Alexander, 175.
[17] Martín-Aceña, Pablo, Elena Martinez Ruiz, and María A. Pons. “War and economics: Spanish civil war finances revisited.” European Review of Economic History 16, no. 2 (2012): 158.
[18] Kowalsky, Daniel. “Operation X: Soviet Russia and the Spanish Civil War.” Bulletin of Spanish Studies 91, no. 1–2 (2014): 168–69.
[19] See for example Vernon Richards’ Lessons of the Spanish Revolution
[20] Alexander, 372.
