Anarchy Works.pdf - Infoshop.org

economy
The Barcelona congress of all Catalan collectives, on August
28, 1937, provides an example of their coordinating activities and
decisions. The collectivized shoe factories needed two million
pesetas credit. Because of a shortage ofleather, they had to cut
down on hours, though they still paid all their workers full time
salaries. The Economic Council studied the situation, and reported
that there was no surplus of shoes. The congress agreed to grant
credit to purchase leather and to modernize the factories in order
to lower the prices of the shoes. Later, the Economic Council
outlined plans to build an aluminum factory, which was necessary
for the war effort. They had located available materials, secured the
cooperation of chemists, engineers, and technicians, and decided to
raise the money through the collectives. The congress also decided
to mitigate urban unemployment by working out a plan with
agricultural workers to bring new areas into cultivation with the
help of unemployed workers from the cities.
In Valencia, the CNT organized the orange industry, with two
hundred seventy committees in different towns and villages for
growing, purchasing, packing, and exporting; in the process, they
got rid of several thousand middlemen. In Laredo, the fishing
industry was collectivized-workers expropriated the ships, cut
out the middlemen who took all the profit, and used those profits
to improve the ships and other equipment or to pay themselves.
Catalunya's textile industry employed two hundred fifty thousand
workers in scores of factories. During collectivization, they got rid
of high-paid directors, increased their wages by fifteen percent,
reduced their hours from sixty to forty hours per week, bought new
machinery, and elected management committees.
In Catalunya, libertarian workers showed impressive results in
maintaining the complex infrastructure of the industrial society
they had taken over. The workers who had always been responsible
for these jobs proved themselves capable of carrying on and even
improving their work in the absence of bosses. "Without waiting
Anarchy Works
for orders from anyone, the workers restored normal telephone
service within three days [after heavy street fighting ended] ... Once
this crucial emergency work was finished a general membership
meeting of telephone workers decided to collectivize the telephone
system:'50 The workers voted to raise the salaries of the lowest
paid members. The gas, water, and electricity services were also
collectivized. The collective managing water lowered rates by
fifty percent and was still able to contribute large amounts of
money to the anti-fascist militia committee. The railway workers
collectivized the railroads, and where technicians in the railroads
had fled, experienced workers were chosen as replacements.
The replacements proved adequate despite their lack of formal
schooling, because they had learned through the experience of
working together with the technicians to maintain the lines.
Municipal transportation workers in Barcelona-sixty five
hundred out of seven thousand of whom were members of the
CNT -saved considerable money by kicking out the overpaid
directors and other unnecessary managers. They then reduced
their hours to forty per week, raised their wages between sixty
percent (for the lowest income bracket) and ten percent (for the
highest income bracket), and helped out the entire population by
lowering fares and giving free rides to schoolchildren and wounded
militia members. They repaired damaged equipment and streets,
cleared barricades, got the transportation system running again
just five days after fighting ceased in Barcelona, and deployed a
fleet of seven hundred trolleys-up from the six hundred on the
streets before the revolution-repainted red and black. As for their
organization:
[T]he various trades coordinated and organized their work
into one industrial union of all the transport workers.
50 Ditto, p. 88.
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