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grew, transport and health services, food and textile industries were
all managed efficiently. In some areas of the economy – Peirats
highlights baking – CNT members managed to improve on prerevolutionary
standards of production. As importantly, the workers
accomplished their ends democratically, through self-management.
Kevin Doyle of the Workers’ Solidarity Movement believes that antiglobalizers
can learn a lot from their example. The Spanish workers,
he argues, provided ‘one of the best examples of how alternatives to
capitalism can actually function and thrive’. 38 How can their success
be explained? Mintz is unequivocal:
For us it is unquestionably the structure of the CNT and the internationalist
outlook it imbued in its militants which explains this speed
of organisation. Even if the lectures, pamphlets and books explaining
the ideas of libertarian communism were simplistic they were
adequate and, without pretending to offer easy solutions for everything,
they convinced the militants of the need to respond quickly to
the possibilities of the situation with initiative and creativity. 39
In the second group, critics acknowledge the revolutionary
achievements of CNT in Barcelona and elsewhere, but question the
extent to which syndicalism can be credited with the revolution’s
achievements. Bookchin suggests that the limited success of the
wartime experiment was the result of independent initiatives taken by
workers, outside the organizational framework of the CNT, and not as
a consequence of syndicalism. Moreover, whilst he argues that the
CNT leadership included many moderates keen to keep the revolution
in check, he locates the weaknesses of the CNT in its ‘economistic’
outlook, not the political foibles of these personalities. In 1907, in
famous debate with Pierre Monatte, Malatesta described the relationship
between anarchism and syndicalism in the form of the equation:
anarchism > syndicalism. 40 Bookchin adopts a similar view. Like all
syndicalist movements, the CNT wrongly prioritized the struggle of
the industrial workers and confused the ability to control production
with the construction of anarchy. The ‘high regard that the factory
system imposes on the workers, proved fatal’. He continues:
In areas influenced by the CNT, the workers did indeed, ‘expropriate’
the economy ... But ‘workers’ control’ ... did not produce a ‘new
society’. The underlying idea that by controlling much of the
economy the anarcho-syndicalist movement would essentially
control the society ... proved a myth’. 41