Foreign News: Anarchism Without Beards

Bolshevism is one thing and Anarchism is another. Last week Walter Duranty, No. 1 contemporary reporter on Bolshevism, had left Moscow to report in Barcelona upon Anarchism—the most interesting principle of Government to arise amid the civil war in Spain.

Barcelona is the capital of Catalonia, a Spanish district so strongly Separatist that four years ago it won from Madrid a partial independence recently made complete (TIME, Aug. 31). Last week there was a chance that the Catalonian Communists may get the upper hand and establish a Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Likewise there was a chance that momentarily powerless Luis Companys, the Left Republican President of Catalonia, may regain control. But for the time being Barcelona was in the hands of Anarchists and its interesting condition could therefore be described as Anarchy.

Anarchism, as non-technically defined by the Encyclopaedia Britannica, is “the name given to a principle or theory of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government, harmony in such a society being obtained not by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority, but by free agreements concluded between the various groups, territorial and professional, freely constituted for the sake of production and consumption, as also for the satisfaction of the infinite variety of needs and aspirations of a civilized being.”

Under Anarchism there can be no Dictator such as Stalin, no President such as Roosevelt, in short no Bigwig. Hence Walter Duranty soon discovered and reported that all the Barcelona Anarchists he could find and interview “refused to be called leaders.” Nevertheless, to Mr. Duranty’s friendly eyes, the good people of Barcelona seemed to have, “with surprising ease and absence of disorder, established what is in fact if not in name a Regime of Workers.”

Two Anarchists outstanding in fact if not in title in Barcelona are Buenaventura Durruti and Juan Garcia Oliver, both newly skyrocketed to fame from the looms of Barcelona textile plants. These smooth-shaven, intensely modern young men sufficiently dispose of the Victorian idea that Anarchism is an affair of terrifying beards. As a matter of fact, “The Father of Anarchism,” the late great Pierre-Joseph Proudhon who died in 1865 had only a “Newgate Frill” (fringe of whiskers) around his placid countenance. The last of the internationally great Anarchist thinkers, Russian Prince Peter Kropotkin, who was the perfect prototype of “Bearded Anarchist”, expired peacefully near Moscow in 1921. Not international thinkers but intensely local Barcelona doers by “direct action” are Newshawk Duranty’s new news subjects. Anarchist Durruti goes so far as to scoff contemptuously at the Spanish Government, friendly though it is to Barcelona, charging that in the Cabinet there are ministers who secretly want Generalissimo Franco to take Madrid because they think that unless he does all Spain may go Anarchist.

“The difference between Catalonia and Russia,” reported Mr. Duranty in the New York Times, “was strongly emphasized to me by [Anarchist] Garcia Oliver, a sturdy young man in his early thirties, wearing a militia uniform with a Sam Browne belt and a pistol on his hip. The scene was reminiscent of early revolutionary days in Petrograd.

“The street outside the Capitania and the courtyard was a flurry of motor cars decked in variegated flags and the inscriptions of different political groups. There were the red and black flags of the Anarchists, the red and yellow stripes of Independent Catalonia, the red, violet and yellow of the Spanish Republic, and many others.

“At the entrances to the building were patrols of militia with rifles and pistols and in the anteroom of García Oliver’s office there was a group of youngsters armed to the teeth.

“In fluent French García Oliver said: ‘Our position is exactly opposite to that of the Bolsheviki in November 1917. They seized power with a program of social revolution which knew no limits. Power was thrust on us, but we have no such program.

” ‘Our only struggle is against excessive action by the ultra-privileged classes, the great landlords, the capitalist and the clergy, which finds armed expression in Fascism. [In Catalonia] we have beaten Fascism and its privileges are a thing of the past which will not return. That, however, does not mean we shall imitate the Bolsheviki in racing toward an impossible Utopia.

” ‘Our future political form is still undecided, but Spaniards, especially Catalonians, are intensely individualistic and will never accept the bureaucratic control of the masses the Bolsheviki have developed. We respect property and business except in cases where these are used against us by our enemies. Unless compelled by the hostility of sabotage, we prefer control to expropriation.’ ”

Getting down from Anarchist theory to Anarchist practice, the larger factories and industrial plants of Barcelona had in fact last week resumed production. They were running under councils of workmen and it remained to be seen whether these could continue to obtain raw materials, pay wages and effect profitable sales after the Spanish civil war is over. For the time being, every Barcelona factory capable of being converted to make war materials was running full blast, the Madrid Cabinet buying hand-over-fist everything it could get to arm its militia, paying with gold from the vaults of the Bank of Spain and with crisp new pesetas from its printing presses. Barcelona landlords found their tenants enthusiastically agreed that all rents had been reduced 50%. Small factories and little shops remained under direction of their owners as their workers talked Anarchism.