LIVING

For some, the word brings to mind Barcelona and with good reason, because the city has deep anarchist roots. This ideology of abolishing government, which at one time dominated the city, is still alive in Barcelona’s counter-culture, but has been virtually forgotten by most of the rest of local society.

In the Thirties, in Spain, anarchy was not a controversial indefinable flag waved by the young and alternative, but a set of respectable political ideals to which many people subscribed. The organisation that formally represented anarchy (and still does) was the CNT (Confederación Nacional de Trabajo), and this powerful organisation had a huge membership throughout Spain. In Catalunya alone, in 1931, some 400,000 people belonged, many of them blue-collar workers.

The anarchists and the CNT made a huge contribution during the Spanish Civil War to the side of the Republic, and are remembered as being brave fighters on the front. George Orwell wrote in Homage to Catalonia (1938), “In Catalonia for the first few months, most of the actual power was in the hands of the Anarcho-Syndicalists, who controlled most of the key industries.”

A present-day Barcelona ‘eco-anarchist’, Dídac S. Costa, agrees with Orwell. “The CNT is the central body of a certain type of anarchism, syndicated anarchy, which historically had the most overall power in Spain and perhaps too, internationally, because of what they accomplished in the Thirties,” he told Metropolitan.

The Thirties were the glory days for anarchy in Barcelona. However, after Franco’s victory in the Civil War, anarchy and its followers were all but exterminated or driven into exile, a defeat from which the movement never quite recovered. The history of anarchy in Barcelona is a complex one, which could be one reason why so much of it has been forgotten by the majority of people here.

“It is impossible to understand Barcelona without understanding its anarchist past,” Mateo Rello told Metropolitan. Rello is the editor for the anarchist newspaper Solidaridad Oberera, or ‘El Soli’ as anarchists call it. The paper, which represents the CNT, was founded in 1907 and has been bringing anarchist news to Barcelona for over a hundred years. Like the other approximately 1,000 volunteers working for the CNT in Barcelona, Rello is a volunteer with a day job. Because the CNT is completely independent it does not take money from the Spanish government and is funded privately.