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

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Anarchism
• military culture
• agency
• militarisation
• Spanish Civil War

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. For the emergence of a more militarised conception of anarchism, see (Ealham 2004, 130–41; Noland 1970, 289–304; Dolgoff 1972, 205)

2. The 1995 Ken Loach film “Land and Freedom,” heavily influenced by Homage to Catalonia, provides a portrayal of these practices, including a lengthy discussion of the risks of militarisation into the Popular Army.

3. Taking the example of the 41^st Mixed Brigade, 56.1% of its soldiers were described as agricultural workers, with 26.6% being identified as urban workers and 17.3% as belonging to “other professions.” Of those whose political affiliation was recorded, 44.2% were UGT affiliates, 18.5% members of the PCE, 15.1% members of the JSU, 8.7% CNT affiliates with 2.7% identifying as Republicans (“Composición Político-Social y Militar de Las Fuerzas de La 36a y 41a Brigada Mixta, de Esta [Cuarta] División 1937).

4. As Matthews (2012, 44–47) highlights, the CRIM were the first stage in the training and socialisation of Republican soldiers but it should be emphasised that, given the urgency of Republican mobilisation, much of these processes took place at the front itself. Here the Hogares and Rincones del Soldado offered spaces for “rational recreation” in a heterogenous antifascist ambience, combining slogans and symbols of the Republic with those of social and cultural revolution (Gómez and Antonio 2020). Similarly, the Escuelas for officers and commissars were, at the outset, intended to be syncretic and non-partisan (Oliver 1978, 357–62), though expressions of partisanship were by no means uncommon (see Sicart 2003, 28–44).