Revolution in Spain: 1937
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defense of the Republic was left in the hands of bourgeois parties.
In a matter of days these armed workers and peasants had begun to construct a new order in the areas they controlled. With virtually every body of the Popular Front government having ceased to function, the new worker and peasant committees took over most government and economic tasks. On July 19, workers stormed the military garrison in Barcelona, taking control of it. For months afterward, a state of dual power existed in Spain, in which the Popular Front government had to share power with the armed masses.
Anarchists join bourgeois gov’t Anarchism’s traditional position toward states—and the basis of their professed superiority in matters of democracy over Marxists—was one of absolute refusal to recognize any state’s authority, and certainly not to participate in them. Yet in the very first days after the uprising that threw back the fascist rebellion, CNT leaders were dickering with the Popular Front for seats in a reorganized government.
Nowhere is the story of the anarchists’ entry into the corridors of bourgeois power better told than in the account by CNT leader J. García Oliver in “The Revolutionary