Work and Revolution: Workers' Control in Barcelona in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-38

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

The enormous literature on the Spanish Revolution and civil war is dominated by a political, military or diplomatic perspective. Few historians, whether Communist, Republican,franquista, anarchist, syndicalist, Trotskyist, or even those lacking a clear political perspective, have written a social history of the events leading to the Revolution and the Revolution itself. This article will attempt partially to fill the vacuum by analyzing the economic and social development of Barcelona, the capital of Spain's most economically advanced region, Catalonia, and its most important city. The social and economic development of Barcelona in Catalonia will be interwoven with the story of the two main actors in the drama of the Spanish Revolution - the bourgeoisie (the owners of the means of production) and the working class. The study of their relationship will aid our understanding of workers' control of the factories and workshops of Barcelona from July 1936 to the end of 1938. The historiography on workers' control in Barcelona has largely ignored a fundamental problem in Spanish history: the weakness of the Spanish bourgeoisie. This weakness is twofold. Politically, the Spanish bourgeoisie never forced a lasting separation of the Church from the state and the military from the civilian government; and economically it created neither a viable agriculture nor productive industry in most of Spain. While the Catalan bourgeoisie had industrialized to some extent and had produced a respectable textile industry in the nineteenth century, by the opening of the twentieth