“¡Vivan las tribus!”: persecution, resistance and anarchist agency in the Popular Army during the Spanish Civil War (1936-9)

Abstract

ABSTRACT The anarchist participation in the Popular Army during the Spanish Civil War has largely been subsumed into wider narratives regarding the modernising impulses of the Republican state on the one hand, and the resistance to statist collaboration mounted within the libertarian movement on the other. In this dichotomy, the anarchists who participated in militarisation are either seen as latecomers to the far-sighted, pan-antifascist project spearheaded by the Republican leadership, or else as passive spectators to the brutal dismantling of the revolutionary project. The weakness of this narrative is that it largely neglects not only the varied motives for accepting militarisation, but also the considerable agency exerted by anarchists at the front in resisting anti-libertarian persecution, while constructing a new identity as the vanguard of antifascism. Drawing on a combination of syndicalist reports, oral testimonies and anarchist press materials, this paper rejects the accepted vision of the front as a space of lethargic defeat. Rather, it reinterprets it as a space in which the anarchists instrumentalised their traditions and practices, alongside their inviolable moral authority achieved through their antifascist war experience, to establish a libertarian subculture within the Popular Army.