Excerpts from ANARCHISTS IN THE SPANISH REVOLUTION by José Pierats #3

The war of fronts led the CNT into the mire of political collaboration and to give up our past without any kind of recompense, since the more we surrendered as we collaborated, the more was demanded of us. While the policy of collaboration went ahead, we anarchists were able to gain some influence, but it was inevitable that we would fall sooner or later on the side of the State, and we were soon absorbed by the State bureaucracy. Many of our comrades realized the inevitability of the process and found they enjoyed the seats of power.

What redeemed our role in the revolution of July 19 was the work of the regular militants, who echoed the position of our classic theorists, and fled the bureaucratising ambience of committees, trying instead to make the revolution in concrete ways, or who simply fought, without ever having read Bakunin or Kropotkin.

We still argue in our circles about whether we should have instituted full libertarian communism in Catalonia from the start, with all of its consequences. Assuming something which is very dubious, that "going all out" would have had the virtue of being able to extend anarchism to all of the loyal zone, I am still convinced, even without the Fascist presence, that we would not have been able to avoid a civil war. In such a situation, what would have happened? Most likely, the formation of a strong revolutionary government, which excluded the opposition - a supremely centralized power with a coercive apparatus to prevent and repress opposition. In such a situation the means would have completely obliviated our ends, as occurred in the Russian experience.