spanish anarchism refracted: theme and image in the millenarian and revisionist literature

$: Spanish Anarchism Refracted: Theme and Image in the Millenarian and Revisionist Literature$
Martha Grace Duncan

Spanish Anarchism Refracted: Theme and Image in the Millenarian

and Revisionist Literature

How can we know the dancer from the dance? W. B. Yeats'

[T]he French Revolution as commonly conceived never took place. C. Levi-Strauss2

Symbolizing for some the unrecoverable past, for others the struggle against materialism, or the spontaneous wishes of the disinherited, Spanish anarchism has long fascinated scholars and other observers. Like Spain itself, exotic as a result of its domination by the Moors and its isolation from modern European currents, Spanish anarchism has appeared to many as a curious remnant - a medieval movement in the modern age, its adherents exhibiting a passionate commitment and 'simplicity of surrender'3 that may be unattainable in industrialized societies.

To others, this view of Spanish anarchism is untenable, indeed, an anathema. According to this perspective, the traditional interpretation 'taints' the movement, making Spanish anarchism appear quasi-religious and merely utopian. Basing their assertions on results attained through modern historical methods, revisionist historians4 maintain that Spanish anarchism was secular and rational, characterized by a capacity for organization, a high level of class- consciousness, and an orientation toward the future.

This essay endeavours to explore the many meanings of Spanish anarchism. Its emphasis lies not on the movement of flesh and blood that had a real impact on history, nor on Spanish anarchist literature. Rather, its concern is with the literature about Spanish anarchism as a means of discovering how interpreters' perceptions have been affected by their own values, wishes, and inner conflicts.

Journal of Contemporary History (SAGE, London, Newbury Park, Beverly Hills and New Delhi), Vol. 23 (1988), 323-346.

Journal of Contemporary Histor)

The essay argues that the revisionist theorists exhibit a bias against millenarianism, reflected in numerous errors of reasoning, and stemming from two principal sources: their positive orientation toward anarchism, and their dichotomization of the religious and secular, the emotional and rational. While the paper takes a predominantly logical approach to the revisionist literature -

raising questions about its assumptions, inferences, and use of terms - in examining the millenarian works, it applies the methods of literary criticism. In particular, it delineates rhetorical devices the millenarian writers use to enhance Spanish anarchism: images and metaphors identifying the movement with the essence of Spain, with the biblical past, with profound emotion, and idealized childhood.

Among the undisputed facts about the origins of Spanish anarchism is the catalytic role played by Giuseppe Fanelli, Bakunin's emissary, who arrived in Spain in 1868. Speaking only in Italian and French, conveying much of his meaning by gesture and tone, Fanelli converted a small group of Spanish typographers and printers to the anarchist philosophy.

From this small beginning the movement grew rapidly, attaining a

following of 60,000 by 1873. It flourished in Andalusia - the classic land of the latifundia,5 of the large estates owned by absentee landlords and worked by desperately poor landless peasants. More

particularly, anarchist ideas met with a receptive response among the Andalusian landless, smallholders, tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and artisans. In Barcelona and other towns in the north-eastern region of Catalonia, many of the factory workers became anarchists; some were migrants from the rural south.

Spanish anarchism did not envision the abolition of all government or all authority. Rather, its political goal was the destruction of the state for the purpose of preserving the autonomy of the local

community. The central place accorded the value of liberty and the

emphasis placed upon the dangers of political centralization distin-

guished Spanish anarchism from socialism and communism. Yet, Spanish anarchism resembled the latter two movements in espousing the goal of equality. In many of the villages and towns where the anarchists came to power in the social revolution of July 1936, the anarchists abolished money and set up a central exchange bureau to collect and redistribute all produce. Evidence points to the meticulous

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Duncan: Spanish Anarchism Refracted

apportionment of wages in accordance with needs and the solicitude shown for widows, invalids, and orphans.6 While anarchist doctrine favoured collectivization of land, rural anarchists themselves remained divided on this issue, with many clinging to the idea of reparto - the division of land into individual holdings. Among the industrial workers of Barcelona, a principal aim was the expro- priation and management of industries by committees of workers and technicians.

The anarchists refused to recognise spheres of life immune from politics. The same assumption of man's natural goodness that formed the basis of the anarchists' political and economic goals also implied atheism and puritanism in the individual's day-to-day conduct. Going to mass, drinking wine, or digging in one's own field could be grounds for subjection to heavy community pressure.

As the long-term means to revolution, the anarchists had a profound faith in the efficacy of education. Therefore, an important sustained technique of the anarchist organizers was to combat illiteracy by setting up schools and libraries. In the interests of dignity and health, the organizers discouraged the consumption of alcohol and use of tobacco.7 The anarchists rejected participation in parliamentary democracy in favour of direct action: strikes and violence. Some anarchists adopted the doctrine of 'propaganda by the deed', espousing individual terrorist acts, and many believed in the morality of revolutionary violence.8

The anarchist movement attained a mass following in Spain to a degree that it never did elsewhere, and had a significance in its history unparalleled in any other country. The following facts illustrate the movement's importance. In the year 1919, the anarchist-dominated Confederacion Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) was by far the largest working-class movement in Spain; in 1936, its membership was perhaps as great as 1.6 million. In the early days of the Civil War, the anarchists controlled most of north-eastern Spain: workers' committees took over factories and railways in Catalonia, while in Aragon, Catalonia, the Levante, and Andalusia, peasants took over much of the land and set up libertarian communes. Notwithstanding their opposition to participation in parliamentary democracy, in 1936, four anarchists took positions as ministers in the cabinet of Largo Caballero. It was not until its suppression by Franco's forces in 1939 that anarchism ceased to play a major role in Spanish politics.

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Journal of Contemporary History

Utopian Fury: The Millenarian Interpretation of Spanish Anarchism

Writing in 1936 in Ideology and Utopia, Karl Mannheim stated that the chiliastic mentality was preserved 'in its purest and most genuine form' in revolutionary anarchism.9 In a footnote, he singled out the Bakunian variety of anarchism as that which 'comes closest ... to continuing the chiliastic outlook in the modern world'.10 Others accepting the millenarian intepretation of Spanish anarchism include: Constancio Bernaldo de Quiros, inElEspartaquismo Agrario Andaluz (Madrid 1919); Franz Borkenau, in The Spanish Cockpit (London 1937); Gerald Brenan, in The Spanish Labyrinth (London 1943); J. Diaz del Moral, in Historia de las Agitaciones Campesinas Andaluzas (Madrid 1929); E. J. Hobsbawm, in Primitive Rebels (New York 1959) and Revolutionaries (New York 1973); Edward Malefakis, in Agrarian Reform and Peasant Revolution in Spain (New Haven 1970); and Stanley G. Payne, in The Spanish Revolution (New York 1970).

As applied to Spanish anarchism, an atheistic movement, the term 'millenarian' (or 'chiliastic') functions metaphorically. It calls attention to the resemblance between Spanish anarchism and the

religious sects that live in 'tense expectation'' of a millennium, the

period of a thousand years to be followed by Christ's Second Coming.

Millenarian movements are eschatological; they are preoccupied with the 'final things'. This mentality exhibits 'no sense for the

process of becoming';'2 millenarian movements are characterized by 'a fundamental vagueness'13 regarding the means of effecting revolution.

In addition to its conception of time. millenarianism is defined by the utopian nature of its goals.

It is characteristic of this kind of movement that its aims and premises are boundless. A social struggle is seen not as a struggle for specific, limited objectives, but as an event of unique importance, different in kind from all other struggles known to history, a cataclysm from which the world is to emerge totally transformed and redeemed.'4

The following account of a Spanish anarchist illustrates both the

utopianism and the historical indeterminacy that are characteristics of millenarianism.

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I was standing on a hill watching the smoke and flames of some two hundred houses in Malaga mount into the sky. An old Anarchist of my acquaintance was standing beside me. 'What do you think of that?' he asked. I said 'They are burning down

Malaga.' 'Yes,' he said, 'They are burning it down. And I tell you - not one stone will be left on another stone - no, not a plant nor even a cabbage will grow there, so that there may be no more wickedness in the world.'5

We see another epitome of these qualities in the following exchange:

'Senorito, when will the great day come?' a poor man asked a senator in 1903. 'What day?' 'Why the day on which we shall all be equal and when the earth will be divided up equally among us all."6

Brenan, who quotes the second passage from Diaz del Moral's classic study of the Andalusian anarchists, says that he can confirm from his own experience the anarchists' belief that the rich 'may some day see the light and be converted'. He goes on: 'It is a consequence of their absolute conviction that they are in the right and that, in the end, truth and reason must prevail.'17

Brenan and others regard Spanish anarchism as a millenarian movement in part because it resembled a religion; in particular, a religious sect. An analysis of Brenan's material suggests that he likens Spanish anarchism to a sect for three principal reasons: (1) its demand for a total commitment from its followers; (2) its emotionalism; and (3) its negative preoccupation with the Catholic Church. The first two qualities are exemplified in a passage where Brenan presents a typical conversion experience:

Sometimes, after a single reading from Tierra y Libertad or El Productor, a labourer would feel illuminated by the new faith. The scales would fall from his eyes and everything seem clear to him. He then became an obrero consciente. He gave up smoking, drinking, and gambling. He no longer frequented brothels. He took care never to pronounce the word God. He did not marry but lived with his companera, to whom he was strictly faithful, and refused to baptize his children. 8

In regard to the third point, Brenan believes that Spanish anarchism may be described, 'however loosely, as a religious heresy'.19 Impressed by the virulence of the anarchists' attack on the Church, he maintains that the passionate intensity of this attack - as seen, for example, in the widespread burning of churches - can be explained only 'as the hatred of heretics for the Church from which they have sprung'.20 He explains the anarchists' anti-clerical rage as a reaction to an institution that claimed to embody brotherly love and solidarity when in fact it had deserted the Spanish poor.2'

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Theorists have emphasized 'a traditional world-view including the promise of a future age of bliss for the faithful'22 as a precondition of millenarian movements. Thus, millenarian movements have rarely emerged outside of cultures influenced by the Judaeo-Christian messianic tradition. Within such cultures it is the lowest social strata that have tended to adhere to millenarianism.

In terms of immediate or precipitating causes, students of millenarianism have adduced 'catastrophe or the fear of it',23 a markedly uneven relation between expectations and the means of their satisfaction',24 and the 'supposed defection of the authority traditionally responsible for regulating relations between society and the powers governing the cosmos'.25

Writers of the millenarian school have offered numerous expla- nations for the emergence of anarchism as a mass movement in Spain. More particularly, in accounting for the rise of collective revolutionism in the 1840s, students have emphasized the disentailment of land and the creation of the Guardia Civil. The latter, by suppressing less sophisticated forms of social protest, such as banditry, is thought to have fostered political consciousness. In seeking to explain the particularly anarchist form of revolutionism that developed, theorists have highlighted the following factors: the affinity between anarchist ideology and Catholicism, the extreme destitution of the rural

population, the landlessness, the total gap between rich and poor, and the tradition of Spanish particularism.

Underlying Themes and Images in the Millenarian Literature

It is widely recognized that the millenarian literature employs a religious analogy; nevertheless, the millenarian writers' use of other rhetorical devices has received no critical attention heretofore. In this section we shall undertake such an analysis, believing that it illuminates the meaning Spanish anarchism has for the millenarian writers, the appeal this literature has for many, and the revisionists' quarrel with it.

In theory, millenarian analysis emphasizes both the future and past orientation of millenarian movements.26 In its imagery, however, such millenarian classics as The Spanish Labyrinth associate Spanish anarchism more compellingly with the past. More specifically, Brenan relates the anarchist movement to biblical times, an era that is emotionally charged. For instance, immediately following

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the dialogue about burning down Malaga, quoted above, Brenan writes:

It was the voice of Amos or Isaiah ... or of an English sectarian of the seventeenth century.27

Elsewhere, Brenan writes of Spanish anarchism:

Without plunging too far into the unconscious, one may suspect that behind it stands the Pastoral Age, when men stood and watched their flocks by day and meditated like Hebrew prophets upon Vice and Virtue, upon Fate and God, whilst the toil and degradation of agricultural life was left to others.28

In addition to the association of the anarchist movement with an exalted past time, this passage also illustrates the projection of longings for quiescence and dignity.

Another rhetorical device, visible in the following quotations from Brenan, is the suggestion that anarchism is quintessentially Spanish; Spanish anarchism is used synecdochically to mean Spain itself.

[M]uch of what is called 'anarchist' today is merely unadulterated Iberian.... 29

[The anarchist movement is] the most 'Hispanic' thing south of the Pyrenees.30

The millenarian literature on Spanish anarchism tends to exalt the common people, the peasants. By association, the anarchist movement, to which the peasants adhered in remarkable numbers, gains in stature. Consider, for example, the following passage by Brenan:

For two centuries and more the Spanish pueblo ... has been the repository of the virtues and traditions of the race, abandoned by the effete upper classes. Todayfew but the poor can speak with the authentic voice of Spain. 'The surface of our country decays,' said Canovas, 'but never the depths.'31 [Italics added.]

The peasantry is idealized in part because of its association with spontaneous, profound emotion - feelings that are regarded as uncorrupted by civilization. Anarchism, too, is associated with an unusual intensity of feeling; as Mannheim writes: 'With the decline of anarchism, an outlook of passionate depth disappeared almost entirely from the political scene.'32

Related to the themes of the idealized peasantry and of emotion is that of spontaneity - a unity of feeling and action. Thus, Hobsbawm writes:

Spanish agrarian anarchism's advantages were that... it could at times secure an effortless, apparently spontaneous unanimity of action that cannot but impress the observer profoundly.33

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For the millenarian writers, like historians in the American and French revolutionary traditions, spontaneous risings are superior to revolutions that result from planning because they are natural and authentic.

By contrast, the secular/rational school follows the Marxist tradition of acknowledging unashamedly the need for preparation and leadership34 -- for a time gap between feeling and action. Trotsky notes the patronizing quality implicit in the explanation by spontaneity:

To the smug politicians of liberalism and tamed socialism everything that happens among masses is customarily represented as an instinctive process, no matter whether they are dealing with an ant or a beehive.35

Another motif running through the millenarian literature is

Spanish anarchism's unique capacity to articulate the genuine wishes of the oppressed. For instance, Hobsbawm states:

[N]o political movement has reflected the spontaneous aspirations of backward

peasants more sensitively in modern times than Bakuninism....

[I]t reflected the interest and aspirations of the Andalusian pueblo with uncanny closeness.36

In a similar vein, Brenan writes:

We have come here, I think, to the precise significance of Spanish anarchism and its value both to Spain and (though this may seem absurd) to Europe. It voices more

clearly and intelligently than any other Iberian movement the resistance offered by the whole Spanish people to the tyranny and soullessness of the modern machine-

serving age.... There must be no sacrifice to Moloch.37

This image of Spanish anarchism as a true reflection or a perfect voice can be taken at face value, as simply showing the millenarian writers' interest in obtaining an accurate representation of the mentality of a class. But the salience of this theme must be understood in the context of the writers' idealization of the poor and primitive. Thus, if the Andalusian peasants are deemed superior because they are un-

corrupted by civilization, and because they are our only remaining link with the remote past, then it becomes more than a matter of

curiosity or accuracy to ascertain what were their beliefs and

aspirations. The picture of a movement that represented the essence of Spain,

that harked back to a seemingly more peaceful and dignified biblical

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past, that expressed the passionate feeling and articulated the genuine aspirations of the peasantry - this picture evokes contempt from the revisionist theorists. For these thinkers, such a portrait signifies a purely emotional, unrealistic movement, without an economic basis.

Redeeming Spanish Anarchism: The Revisionist Critique of the Millenarian Theory

Michael Weisser's The Peasants of the Montes. The Roots of Rural Rebellion in Spain38

Michael Weisser's study is based on archival research covering the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries in the Montes de Toledo in New Castile. Although it was not originally designed to shed light on the anarchist movement, Weisser's research forms the basis for his critique of Brenan, Borkenau, and Hobsbawm's theories of Spanish anarchism. Much of Weisser's argument can be summed up in the expression, 'a constant cannot explain a variable'. He argues that the factors usually adduced to explain the rise of Spanish anarchism in the mid-nineteenth century were already present in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; therefore, they cannot be the precipitants of anarchism. Nor can anarchism have the meaning that Weisser believes is usually attributed to it - that of an anti-modernist, anti-urban movement, seeking to return to a Golden Age of egalitarian, autonomous communities.

Though Weisser does not cite it, the following passage by Brenan expresses the view that Weisser is attempting to challenge:

For if anarchism is in one sense a utopian conception of life that opens out its arms to the future, it is also true that the Anarchists have, like the Carlists, their inner eye upon the past. Rural anarchism is quite simply the attempt to recreate the primitive Spanish communes that existed in many parts of Spain in the 16th and 17th centuries.39

Weisser documents that the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century villages of the Montes were far from being egalitarian. In fact, the division between rich and poor was 'probably greater in the past than in the present'.4 In his second, related point, Weisser seeks to show that these villages were hardly autonomous. In the sixteenth century, monarchs controlled many aspects of rural affairs through mechan- isms such as price regulation, obligatory sales of grain, prohibition of mule breeding, and - above all - taxation. Third, Weisser

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demonstrates that during times of economic hardship - of which there were many during this period - the parish almost ceased to

dispense alms. Indeed, in some years of severe distress it gave no alms at all because it had nothing to give.

In relating these findings to Spanish anarchism, Weisser first makes a point about causality. He states that the movement is

commonly viewed as 'the end product of the conflict between modernization and primitive communalism'.41 The onset of the movement, he maintains, is usually explained by the sale of the Church and municipal lands in the first half of the nineteenth century. However, he argues, this 'cannot have upset the balance. ... The

sharp division between rich and poor peasants had been a reality of

peasant life since the modern period.'42 Rather than being a 'confrontation between urban and rural as is usually assumed',43 Weisser sees Spanish anarchism as a confrontation between rich and

poor. To support this point, he shows that the sixteenth-century peasants had accepted many values of the outside world. He also

quotes the rhetoric of anarchist pamphlets that called on rural and urban workers to join together in the revolutionary struggle. Finally, he stresses that it was in the cities that Spanish anarchism originally took hold.

Relying almost exclusively on his material about the Montes

villages in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Weisser deduces his point about the meaning and goals of Spanish anarchism, which he summarizes as follows: 'Thus, Anarchism might have appeared pre-modern in its ideological content and organizational form, but it was not anti-modern. It did not prescribe a return to a Golden Age ... that Golden Age had never existed.' Therefore, the anarchists' goal of

equality 'was directed only toward the future.... Anarchism was the first recognition that such a future could be brought to realization.'44

It is when Weisser extrapolates from his research to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century movement, Spanish anarchism, that he goes astray. To take up the most obvious mistake first, Weisser curiously insists on taking the concept of a 'Golden Age'only in its literal sense. In fact, the term is more often used to convey a mythical, glorious, untroubled time, and to reflect a natural human tendency to idealize the past. In arguing that, if such an age never existed, the image of the

past cannot have played a causal role in Spanish anarchism, Weisser

ignores the motivating power of fantasy. Actually, elements drawn from the past, as well as those thought to be utterly new, are probably entwined in any powerful ideology. As Yonina Talmon writes of

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millenarian movements, 'It is because these movements merge a future orientation with either an overt or covert past orientation that they are such potent agents of change.'45

As to his argument on the origins of the movement, Weisser sets up a monocausal man of straw; to wit, the nineteenth-century disentailment of the land. To be sure, this is a central factor in Hobsbawm's and Brenan's causal arguments, but it is far from being the only one. For example, the introduction of the Civil Guard in the 1840s is at least as important in both analyses. Weisser regards the disentailment as important only insofar as it precipitated class divisions between rich and poor peasants. Since he can establish that such divisions existed prior to the disentailment, he dismisses this change as a precipitant of the anarchist movement. This argument fails to take account of the discontent that may result when an inequitable but traditional condition is exacerbated. Moreover, the exacerbation of class divisions was not the only, or necessarily the most important, consequence of the disentailment. Edward Malefakis, who has made the most thorough study of Spanish rural social structure, describes many ways that the sale of the common lands aggravated the plight of the poor:

Villages made up their loss of revenue from the propios by taxing staple goods bought mostly by the poor. The loss of the comunales deprived the needy of firewood and pasture. The transfer of Church lands to private owners meant that those who worked them no longer benefited from the benevolent terms that the earlier, inefficient administration had allowed. The gradual sale of noble lands to the new bourgeoisie more often harmed than helped the landless, since their new masters, less secure and more ambitious than the old, often proved more rapacious. ... The breakdown of the loose medieval definitions of property resulted in the loss of the right to glean after harvest and to graze animals on the stubble. The substitution of impersonal, universal legal principles for local customary codes often meant that the emphyteutic leases tenants had enjoyed were replaced by short-term leases that could be altered or revoked at will.46

Summarizing these effects, Malefakis writes that the disentailment transformed property relations throughout Spain and 'clearly worsened the lot of the peasants in southern Spain'.47

In addition to the criticisms made above, a final question should be raised about the legitimacy of extrapolating from conditions in New Castile - which was not an anarchist stronghold - to the Spanish anarchism movement in general. Weisser's research, by his own admission, was not originally designed to shed light on Spanish anarchism. For this reason, the following book enjoys a somewhat firmer foothold for challenging the millenarian perspective.

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Temma Kaplan's Anarchists of Andalusia: 1868-190348

Based on archival research, Kaplan's book provides an account of the development of anarchist tactics and ideology in Northern Cadiz Province in Andalusia. She focuses on key cities that were to become strongholds of anarchism in the late nineteenth century.

Kaplan maintains that 'Andalusian anarchism was a rational, not a millenarian response to a specific social configuration.'49 The millenarian interpretation, she believes, is faulty in several respects. First, it ignores the anarchists' clear understanding of the social origins of their oppression. Second, in perceiving the anarchists' defeat as the result of their own irrationality, it ignores the coercive power of the state. Third, the millenarian approach gives too little credit to the anarchists for their ability to establish a movement 'firmly based in working-class culture'.50 In addition to its under- estimation of anarchism, Kaplan maintains that the millenarian view is 'too mechanistic' to explain the rise of the movement.

It implies popular religion forms the background, hunger the trigger, and anarchism the result. It cannot explain why the anarchist movement grew in Andalusia, but not in other regions of Spain that were, if anything, more pious and

equally poor.51

Kaplan argues that the degree of organization, not the religiosity of workers and community, explains the mass mobilizations in Andalusia. More specifically, 'Without the women's sections, libraries, consumers, and producers' co-operatives and secular schools, anarchism might have been destroyed shortly after it was created even though it met the ideological, social, and economic needs of certain groups under stress. The movement survived because it became embedded in popular cultures.'52 Finally, Kaplan feels that to call anarchism a quasi-religious or secular millenarian movement is to denigrate it: 'In a secular age, the taint of religion is the taint of irrationality.'53

Kaplan's focus on details of tactics and organization provides a balance to the emphasis on fervour, utopia, and desperation in the millenarian literature on Spanish anarchism. Nevertheless, in moving from facts to theory, Kaplan draws inferences that go well beyond what she can substantiate. Her arguments rest on a false dichotomy and on a distorted reading of Brenan and the other millenarian theorists. To take up the major problem first, as quoted above, Kaplan views rational and millenarian as mutually exclusive. This

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dichotomy is false on empirical grounds, inasmuch as the movement could have exhibited (and in fact did exhibit) millenarian features at one time and place and secular/rational features at another. Or indeed, even within a given community, some adherents might have believed in the imminent arrival of utopia, while others might have held the view that the making of a revolution was a gradual, prolonged process and that the goal was great improvement, not perfection. Thus, as Norman Cohn observes, the millenarians had 'little in common with the mass movements ... which had limited, realistic aims'.54 The deeper arguments against the dichotomization of the millenarian and the secular will be elaborated below.

In regard to Spanish anarchism in particular, a good deal of evidence exists in the form of first-hand observations by Brenan and Diaz del Moral to establish that the movement exhibited millenarian characteristics. Though impressionistic, such eyewitness accounts are more convincing than the revisionists' assumption that evidence of rational organization and gradualist tactics precludes the existence of millenarian traits in Spanish anarchism.

Besides its assumption of a false dichotomy, another problem with Kaplan's analysis is its distortion of the millenarian theorists' views. As we have seen, Kaplan maintains that the millenarian view ignores the remarkable rootedness of Spanish anarchism in working-class culture. But the following passage by Brenan clearly refutes this claim:

We may pause to consider how eminently suited this organization [of Spanish anarchism] was to Spanish conditions. The first need was to get hold of the half-starving, uneducated field labourers and factory workmen and to fill them with a sense of their own grievances and their own power. These men could not, as a rule, afford to pay a regular subscription and they were suspicious of any influence from outside, which might embroil them with their employers. Any regular trade-union organization with a paid secretariat, acting on orders from Barcelona or Madrid and leading its adherents like a bourgeois Republican party to the polling booths would have been doomed to failure. But the anarchist leaders were never paid.55

Brenan goes on to describe how the

'apostles of the idea', as they were called, lived like mendicant friars on the hospitality of the more prosperous workmen. During the strikes when the leaders would proselytize their beliefs, the numbers would double or treble, and, when the inevitable reaction came, would shrink back to a small kernel of convinced militants. This plasticity of the anarchist movement enabled it to survive persecutions and, as soon as they were over, to reappear stronger than ever.56 [Italics added.]

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Brenan emphasizes that control from below also strengthened anarchism and enabled it to rise again after repeated defeats.

If no European party has shown such resistance, that is because the Spanish anarchists have insisted upon basing their movement upon the free and unfettered impulses of their adherents, organized in local groups, and have not allowed themselves to become enmeshed in the deadening and life-destroying net of a party bureaucracy.5

In another of Kaplan's criticisms, she maintains that the millenarian view overlooked the anarchists' clear understanding of the class origins of their suffering. I know of no study of millenarianism which assumes the absence of class-consciousness. In writing about the agrarian conditions in Andalusia, Brenan explicitly disconfirms this:

And they are also well aware of the manner in which they are exploited. In these towns the atmosphere of hatred between classes - of tenant for landlord, of landless proletariat for everyone who employs him has to be seen to be believed. Since the Republic came in many landlords are afraid to visit their estates. And the labourers are all anarchists.58

Just as she confuses millenarian analysis with a negative judgment of the movement, so also Kaplan confuses millenarian theory with a causal argument. She writes: 'The most common explanation for anarchist mobilization has been that they were millenarian.'59 But in fact millenarianism is not an explanation. The standard studies of millenarianism are filled with complex discussions about the conditions giving rise to millenarian movements - discussions which would be superfluous if millenarianism itself were an explanation.

Kaplan's statement about hunger being the trigger and religion the

background in millenarian analysis is a man of straw. According to Diaz del Moral, one of the millenarian theorists she attacks, 'poverty and hunger are the worst enemies of proletarian agitation'.60 Her

analysis is thus based on a distorted understanding of millenarian

theory. In this connection, it should be mentioned that neither

Kaplan's index nor her bibliography contains a reference to any of the standard works on millenarianism, for example, those by Cohn, Talmon, Thrupp, or Worsley.

Finally, in regard to the stigma Kaplan believes is attached to a millenarian label, it is apparent that Spanish anarchism is hardly tainted for Brenan. Though he discusses anarchism's failure to achieve results, the emotional force of his argument is overwhelmingly

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on the side of the anarchists. Kaplan's belief that 'the taint of religion is the taint of irrationality' appears to be her own projected onto the millenarian theorists.

Murray Bookchin's The Spanish Anarchists: The Heroic Years 1868-193661

Whereas both Weisser and Kaplan's main theoretical purpose is to criticize millenarian theory, this is only an incidental aspect of Bookchin's book. A general narrative of Spanish anarchism, Bookchin's study is sympathetic to the movement, which he regards as representing a realizable ideal.

At first sight, Bookchin seems to present a more balanced and complex view than either Weisser or Kaplan. He does not deny the validity of the millenarian argument but seeks to minimize its importance in various ways. The following passage is an example of a balanced description of what Bookchin perceives as differences between rural and urban-industrial anarchism:

As proletarian anarchism drifted increasingly toward syndicalism, it gave a strong emphasis to organizational expediency. Peasant anarchism retained its intensely moral elements, often conflicting with the values and demands of the cities. As Pitt-Rivers observes, the telegrams to the congress of 1882 which are from Catalonia and the north ring with phrases like 'anarco-sindicalistas'. Those from the sierra talk only of justice and the cause of the people.62

Elsewhere, however, Bookchin acknowledges the millenarian elements in Spanish anarchism but dismisses them as characterizing only the Andalusian anarchists. The following passage exemplifies this approach:

Throughout 1870, however, the real strength of the Spanish Federation lay in the north, particularly in Barcelona and nearby textile towns. All seductive precon- ceptions aside, the fact is that Spanish anarchism first developed among urban industrial workers and craftsmen, not millenarian peasants. Dreaming millenarians and saintly apostles can, of course, be found, but Spanish anarchism's earliest intellectual adherents contained a fair proportion of technicians and scientists.63 [Italics added.]

Here we have an instance of what may be called the 'real anarchists'' argument, variations of which appear in Weisser and Kaplan as well. Bookchin implies that the first anarchists enjoy a greater claim to being anarchists than the later adherents. As to his statement that the real strength of the Federation lay in the urban north, his very next

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paragraph tells us that, by the end of 1872, more than half of the anarchists were Andalusians. In fact, during most of the nineteenth century, Andalusian anarchists outnumbered northern anarchists.

The above quotation exhibits bias in other ways as well: the phrase 'dreaming millenarians' is derogatory: Bookchin uses 'dream' in the sense of an illusion, raher than - as in Martin Luther King's 'I have a dream' speech - an imaginative conception of what could be. Consider, by contrast, a millenarian theorist's observation:

To evoke this sense of time requires, as was stressed, great vision. The idea of the millennium has been one of humanity's great inventions.64

Furthermore, the second passage by Bookchin quoted on page 337 assumes that the millenarians were exclusively peasants, not artisans or workers. Given the important role of artisans in utopian movements throughout history, it is unlikely this was the case. But we need not prove this point here. What is clear is that Bookchin provides no evidence to support his assumption.

In the following remark, made in a footnote, Bookchin again minimizes the millenarian qualities of the movement:

Nearly everyone who comments on the moral emphasis of the Spanish anarchists treats it as a form of quasi-religious asceticism. Perhaps this was the case among the rural anarchists, particularly those who lived in the pueblos, but my own feeling (after discussing the issue with exiled Spanish anarchists from the industrial cities) is that in the north at least, this moral emphasis was similar to the efforts of black radicals in the United States to elevate their people from the influence of a degrading and enslaving culture.65

Here Bookchin seems to assume that quasi-religious asceticism and an attempt to elevate one's people are mutually exclusive. It is also significant that Bookchin places in parentheses the important information that his sources were solely from the industrial cities - a bias he seems to find more legitimate than the rural stance, though he does not tell us why.

In another long passage Bookchin acknowledges a degree of truth in the millenarian interpretation and reproduces it in some detail, then minimizes its significance by a simple assertion:

Writers on the Andalusian uprisings - including the anarchists themselves - tend to emphasize the millenarian quality of these outbursts; and it is true that in the naive and simple directness of their visions, the insurgent peasants and braceros of Andalusia seem to parallel the rural folk of the late middle ages with their enraptured dreams of a 'second coming'. . . . There would be a brief period of

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fighting, followed by a period of repression in which the dream would seem to evaporate. Elation and hope would be succeeded by sullen despair and fatalism.... Later, however, passions would begin to surge up again, and the dream would reappear. The cycle would be repeated with the same fervor, as though a regeneration had occurred without a background of past defeats.

But granting the cycles of periodic uprising and decline, the agrarian movement in the south had a solid economic core that accountsfor its continual revival in theface of unfavorable odds.66 [Italics added.]

Here the economic goal (of land redistribution) is characterized as 'solid' and accorded status as the only or primary explanation for anarchism's strength. Yet no evidence or analysis is presented to justify weighing this variable more heavily than other factors that might also account for the persistence of the movement.

In the next paragraph, still presumably addressing the millenarian interpretation, Bookchin writes,

What doomed the agrarian movement of the period was not the impracticality of its visions but its isolation. The upsurges were usually limited to a few localities.... Organization was necessary to coordinate the insurrections into a common movement.67

Here, Bookchin implies that previous writers had regarded Spanish anarchism as impractical in its goals. Yet Hobsbawm and Brenan both draw attention to the realism of the anarchists' goal of the self-governing pueblo, in the Andalusian context. Thus, Hobsbawm writes: 'Under Andalusian conditions such a programme was less utopian than it seems. . . . [It] seems reasonable to assume that authority and the state were unnecessary intrusions.'68 Bookchin's explanation for the failure of Spanish anarchism is in fact the same criticism presented by the millenarian theorists: i.e., that the anarchists were impractical not so much in their vision as in their methods of bringing it to fruition.69

Jerome Mintz's The Anarchists of Casas Viejas70

Finally, we shall briefly analyse Mintz's acclaimed work, focusing on those passages that bear on the nature of Spanish anarchism.

In discussing the anarchists' uprising at Casas Viejas, Mintz explicitly rejects the millenarian interpretation:

Hobsbawm believed that Casas Viejas was the classic anarchist uprising: 'utopian, millenarian, apocalyptic, as all witnesses agree it to have been' (p. 90). But the facts proved otherwise. Casas Viejas rose not in a frenzy of blind millenarianism but in response to a call for a nationwide revolutionary strike.71

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Nevertheless, without noticing the contradiction, Mintz repeatedly provides evidence that at least some anarchists anticipated a radical, sudden transformation of the world, to be effected by means that were fundamentally vague. The millenarian's utopian goals and expectation of imminent change are expressed in the following quotation:

[Jose Monroy acting president of the anarchist Centro of Casas Viejas:] If I hadn't believed that communismo libertario would come the next day, I would have stayed with my goats instead of spending three years in prison, instead of being beaten.72 [Italics added.]

The distinctive millenarian conceptions of time and revolutionary method are illustrated in the following passages:

[T]he membership of the CNT found itself drawn into sudden violent strikes that seemed to erupt without plan orforethought. Audacity rather than organization, it was

thought, would bring the masses into action, destroy the government, and hasten the day of revolution.73 [Italics added.]

[Direct quotation from Jose Monroy:] Sopas brought back instructions that the revolution was about to begin. He told me the orders: when they signaled the light in

Medina, we were to begin the revolution. We knew of it at leastfour days in advance, but we did nothing to preparefor it. There was nothing to prepare. 74 [Italics added.]

Mintz is probably correct in stating:

For every enthusiast dreaming good dreams of the morrow, there were others who were frightened, unenthusiastic or cynical about the prospects of an insurrection in their own town.75

The appropriate inference to draw, however, is that millenarian and non-millenarian adherents co-existed in the movement, rather than that the millenarian view is invalid.

In the pages above, we have focused on one theme - the nature of

Spanish anarchism - as it is treated in four key works of revisionist scholarship. The preceding analysis has shown that these scholars reveal a bias against religion, emotionalism, and millenarianism. The

following errors reflect this failure of objectivity: (1) insisting on a literal interpretation of the 'Golden Age' concept, ignoring the motivating power of fantasy; (2) regarding past- and future-orientations as mutually exclusive; (3) treating the northern, industrial workers as

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more representative of anarchists than Andalusian artisans and rural workers; (4) using biased language such as 'dreaming millenarians' and 'solid economic core'; (5) extrapolating from anarchists at one time and place to the whole movement; (6) misrepresenting millenarian theory; and (7) ignoring eyewitness reports that corro- borate the millenarian view.

The last two points merit further discussion. First, as to the misrepresentation of millenarian theory, it should be clear that the revisionist scholars attribute to millenarian analysis a negative value judgment that the latter does not make, and a causal theory it does not imply. In addition to these specific distortions, the revisionists generally ignore the richness and complexity of millenarian theory.

Second, the revisionist scholars never address themselves directly to the eyewitness accounts that support the millenarian view. That is, Diaz del Moral, Gerald Brenan and others quote language showing that some anarchists, at least, did live in expectancy of a perfect world to be realized instantaneously; the millenarian literature thus provides direct evidence of the anarchists' state of mind. The revisionist theorists, by contrast, support their theory only by inference from behaviour. To infer state of mind from behaviour is legitimate; nevertheless, the revisionists have not met the burden of persuasion created by the direct testimony on the other side.

Our purpose has not been to demonstrate that the movement was millenarian - though it seems clear that some Spanish anarchists exhibited millenarian characteristics at some times. Rather, it has been to show how the revisionists' unreflective adherence to certain values has brought about a failure of objectivity - this on the part of precisely those historians who are committed to an unromanticized view of their subject.

Now it may be objected that the secular/rational interpretation is simply an alternative model, and that all models abstract from reality and, hence, entail some distortion. Moreover- this line of reasoning would continue - the millenarian model, too, distorts, by omitting or minimizing aspects of Spanish anarchism that the revisionists' model highlights. All this is perfectly true. But the secular/rational interpretation eliminates too much that is valuable in the millenarian perspective - in particular, its focus on the unusual conception of time and the religious flavour of the movement.

The revisionists' model leads to unfortunate results from a heuristic perspective as well. For example, in investigating the causes

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of Spanish anarchism, researchers employing this model have no reason to compare the matrices of Spanish anarchism with those of other millenarian movements - a potentially fruitful approach. In any event, the revisionist scholars eliminate millenarian attri- butes not because they wish to maximize the virtues of a good model - rigour, economy, and heuristic value - but rather because they are unwilling to acknowledge the millenarian features of the movement.

The bias against the millenarian interpretation reflects more specific prejudices - in particular, the bias against religion and that in favour of Spanish anarchism. As one manifestation of the prejudice against religion, we can quote Temma Kaplan's remark: 'In a secular age, the taint of religion is the taint of irrationality.' The prejudice also expresses itself in the dichotomization of millenarian and secular or rational. As we have discussed above, this dichotomy is false on empirical grounds. But it is false in a more profound sense as well. To take up the narrow point first, the revisionists assume that religion refers to a belief not in accordance with reason. In fact, a religion may be a belief system that is, in part, 'outside the scope of reason or ... not yet tested by reason'.76 More generally, while the sacred and the profane, the emotional and the rational, may be analytically distinct, they are, in practice, inextricably entwined.

The errors committed by the revisionists are also in the service of their positive orientation toward Spanish anarchism. This positive cathexis may flow from the need to believe there is a viable alternative to capitalism and communism.

Finally, the revisionist writers may be responding more to the latent than to the manifest content of the millenarian literature. Many of the themes the millenarian writers have associated with Spanish anarchism - in particular, the primitive, the spontaneous, the emotional, and the natural - are also symbolically linked with children, or rather with a Rousseauian, pre-Freudian view of children. It follows that a latent theme of the millenarian literature is the identification of Spanish anarchism with childhood. Perhaps underlying the differences between the millenarian and the secular/ rational schools is a cleavage between those who can sublimate their yearning to return home - to the long ago and far away - and those who repudiate such a yearning, believing it to be immature and regressive.

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This paper has attempted to show how scholars' unexamined values and associations have powerfully influenced their interpretations of Spanish anarchism. With respect to the revisionist writers, it has sought to demonstrate a bias against millenarianism, reflecting an assumption that the religious and the secular, the emotional and the rational, are mutually exclusive. While the revisionist writers tend to see Spanish anarchism as less than it is, the writers of the millenarian school merge the anarchist movement with larger themes - the exaltation of the peasantry, of the emotional, of the biblical past, and of Spain itself.

In exploring the indeterminate relationship between a historical movement and interpretations of it, this paper has not intended to reach any final conclusion about the nature of Spanish anarchism. Nor has it intended to imply a purely subjectivistic or solipsistic position on the possibility of attaining valid knowledge. That all interpretations are not equally valid, that the 'universe displays various orders of recalcitrance'77 to our interpretations, requiring their alteration accordingly - this has been presupposed throughout this essay. But the literature on Spanish anarchism provides a particularly clear illustration of the inter-relationships between interpretation and a sometimes-elusive reality - an illustration that has not previously been explored in this context. From apocalyptic ecstasy to rational organization, from belated medieval millenarianism to proto-Marxian revolutionism, radically divergent meanings have been read into Spanish anarchism, tending to confirm Mannheim's belief that

[e]very epoch has its fundamentally new approach and its characteristic point of view, and consequently sees the 'same' object from a new perspective.... 78

This states the proposition from the vantage point of the sociology of knowledge. As Joan Didion has observed about the functions such theorizing performs in the human psyche, 'We tell ourselves stories in order to live.'79 This essay has been intended, in part, as an elaboration on this theme, on man's essentially mythopoeic nature, on his tendency to commit the pathetic fallacy in the larger sense: projecting his own moods and prejudices, his longings and inner conflicts, onto the universe.

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Notes

This article was presented at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association in Chicago on 28 December 1984. I wish to thank Janet Aspen, George Esenwein, David Lange, Edward Malefakis, the late Nathan Leites and Joan Connelly Ullman for their comments on an earlier draft.

1. William Butler Yeats, 'Among School Children', The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (New York 1951), 212.

2. Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago 1966), 258. 3. Seymour Martin Lipset, 'Working Class Authoritarianism', Political Man

(London 1959), 107. 4. 'Revisionist' is employed here as a shorthand expression referring to authors

who explicitly reject the earlier, millenarian view of Spanish anarchism. The term is not used to refer to any particular ideological position, such as Marxism. In discussing the revisionist literature on Spanish anarchism, this article focuses exclusively on works in the English language.

5. I have adapted this phrase from Gerald Brenan, The Spanish Labyrinth (London 1943) 114.

6. Hugh Thomas, 'Anarchist Agrarian Collectives in the Spanish Civil War', in A Century of Conflict, 1850-1950, ed. Martin Gilbert (London 1966), 262-3.

7. Gabriel Jackson, 'The Origins of Spanish Anarchism', South-Western Social Science Quarterly, XXXVI, 2 (September 1955), 141.

8. Stanley Payne, The Spanish Revolution (New York 1970). For a discussion of violence as an appropriate response to the economic and political conditions in Catalonia, see Joan Connelly Ullman, The Tragic Week (Cambridge, Mass. 1968), 318-19.

9. Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, (New York 1936), 225. 10. Ibid., 218. 11. Yonina Talmon, 'Pursuit of the Millennium: The Relation Between Religious

and Social Change', Reader in Comparative Religion: An Anthropological Approach, eds. W. Lessa and E. Vogt (New York 1965), 526.

12. Mannheim, op. cit., 225. 13. E.J. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels (New York 1959), 58. 14. Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (New York 1977), 281. 15. Brenan, op. cit., 189. 16. Ibid., 198. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid., 174. 19. Ibid., 190. 20. Ibid., 198. 21. Ibid., 191. 22. Norman Cohn, 'Medieval Millenarism: Its Bearing on the Comparative Study

of Millenarian Movements', in Millennial Dreams in Action, ed. Sylvia Thrupp (The Hague: Comparative Studies in Society and History, Supplement II, 1962), 42.

23. Ibid., 42. 24. Talmon, op. cit., 530. 25. Cohn, 'Medieval Millenarism', op. cit. 42. 26. See, e.g., Talmon, op. cit., 536.

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27. Brenan, op. cit., 189. 28. Ibid., 196. 29. Ibid., 193. 30. Ibid., 197. 31. Ibid., 197. 32. Mannheim, op. cit., 248. 33. Hobsbawm, op. cit., 90-1. 34. Crane Brinton, The Anatomy of Revolution (New York 1959), 145-6. 35. Leon Trotsky, The Russian Revolution (New York 1959), 145-6. 36. Hobsbawm, op. cit., 82-3. 37. Brenan, op. cit., 196. 38. Michael Weisser, The Peasants of the Montes. The Roots of Rural Rebellion in

Spain (Chicago 1972). 39. Brenan, op. cit., 195. 40. Weisser, op. cit., 37. 41. Ibid., 120. 42. Ibid., 116. 43. Ibid., 119. 44. Ibid., 120. 45. Talmon, op. cit., 536. 46. Malefakis, op. cit., 64. 47. Ibid., 61, 135. 48. Temma Kaplan, Anarchists of Andalusia: 1868-1903 (Princeton 1977). 49. Ibid., 11. 50. Ibid., 211. 51. Ibid., 210. 52. Ibid., 61-62. 53. Ibid., 21 1; see also Jerome Mintz, The Anarchists of Casas Viejas (Chicago and

London 1982), 5 ('[U]se of the terms "religious" and "millenarian" stamp anarchist goals as unrealistic and unattainable. Anarchism is thus dismissed as a viable solution to social ills.' (Citations omitted).

54. Cohn, 'Medieval Millenarism', op. cit., 38. 55. Brenan, op. cit., 145. 56. Ibid., 146. 57. Ibid., 147. 58. Ibid., 122. 59. Kaplan, op. cit., 207. 60. Cited in James Joll, The Anarchists (New York 1964), 240; see also Hobsbawm,

op. cit., 79 ('Anyway, famine normally had its usual result of inhibiting rather than stimulating social movements . ..').

61. Murray Bookchin, The Spanish Anarchists. The Heroic Years. 1868-1936 (New York 1977).

62. Ibid., 91. 63. Ibid., 97. 64. Thrupp, op. cit., 25. 65. Bookchin, op. cit., 66. 66. Ibid., 95. 67. Ibid., 95. 68. Hobsbawm, op. cit., 82.

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69. For a challenge to the assumption that anarchist techniques were ineffective - and incompatible with winning a war, see Noam Chomsky, 'Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship', in American Power and the New Mandarins (New York 1967).

70. Mintz, op. cit. 71. Ibid., 272. 72. Ibid., 195. 73. Ibid., 142. 74. Ibid., 186. 75. Ibid., 196. 76. Quoted in Webster's Third International Dictionary, illustrating a meaning of

'irrational'. 77. Kenneth Burke, Permanence and Change (Indianapolis 1954), 255. 78. Mannheim, op. cit., 271. 79. Joan Didion, The White Album (New York 1979), 11.

Martha Grace Duncan is Assistant Professor of Law at Emory

University, Atlanta. She has contributed to several journals and is currently completing

an article based on a psychoanalysis of prison memoirs.

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spanish anarchism refracted: theme and image in the millenarian and revisionist literature

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