LIBERTARIAN TERRITORIES

THE ANARCHIST SELFGOVERNMENT EXPERIENCE IN BARCELONA DURING THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR (1936 – 1939)

Abstract

During the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), a large portion of the Spanish peasants and urban workers generated a revolutionary process guided by anarchist ideals formulated during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Organized into unions and autonomous organizations, these protagonists began a vigorous and consistent process of expropriation and collectivization of the means of production and established forms of political and economic self-management in different scales and parts of the Spanish territory. New Dynamics of organization and production were instituted by the creation of autonomous and horizontal structures for the exercise of power. This article aims to analyze the anarchist experience in the process of self-management and urban self-planning in Barcelona. In the introduction, we present a summary of the context in which the Spanish Civil War developed, then we perform an analysis of the dynamics of the city before the war and, finally, we seek to identify and analyze the strategies and practices of the Spanish anarchists in relation to the proceedings of self-management and urban self planning, highlighting the dynamics of services, infrastructure and the issue of housing, in order to assess the changes which were made by workers in the dynamics of urban space in Barcelona.