For the autonomy of the municipality – José Xena

Ideas, 21 January 1937

José Xena was a significant figure in the CNT and FAI during the Spanish Civil War. He is best known for providing the one vote against collaboration in the Central Committee of Anti-fascist Militias when this was debated at a Plenum by a group of influential anarchists in Barcelona in July 1936. Following the May days of 1937, Xena took on increasingly prominent roles within the anarchist organisations, defending collaboration at the extraordinary congress of the AIT (International Workers’ Association) in Paris in December 1937, and attempting to impose discipline within the libertarian ranks.

Previously, between July 1936 and May 1937, his position was more enigmatic and interesting. Apparently accepting the decision of the Barcelona Plenum to collaborate with parties and bodies of the state while simultaneously attempting to strengthen the CNT and fortify the revolution, Xena was active in the town of L’Hospitalet, briefly becoming its mayor. In December 1936 he was one of the founders of Ideas, a magazine set up as the mouthpiece of the libertarian movement in the Catalan region of Baix Llobregat, and an important forum for the radical anarchist defenders of the revolution.

The article translated below finds Xena wrestling with the contradictions of the CNT’s policy of collaboration. His agenda should be read in the context of events in L’Hospitalet, where, on Christmas Day, 1936, the socialised food supply industry in the town expropriated two co-operatives. This prompted the representatives of the ERC (moderate Catalan nationalists) and UGT (the socialist trade union, in Catalonia largely under the sway of the Comintern-affiliate, the PSUC), to abandon the municipal council in protest. The CNT took the opportunity to press ahead with a maximalist programme, creating a Regional General Council of the Economy to oversee the socialisation of the town’s economy. In Ideas, Xena’s close collaborator, José Abella, described this as ‘the basis for bringing to a happy conclusion the free commune within a Federation of the Free Peoples of Iberia.’ In his article, Xena defends the right of revolutionary strongholds to press ahead with socialising methods in the municipalities without regard for the parties with no weight in the area.

These interventions demonstrate how the socialisation campaign gathering weight at the outset of 1937 reanimated concepts that had been debated in the anarchist movement prior to the Civil War. Both full socialisation and the autonomy of the municipality / commune were compatible with the CNT’s definition of libertarian communism, synthesised at its Zaragoza Congress in May 1936. Whether they could also be compatible with political collaboration is here questioned by Xena. This question would be answered in a matter of months by the Barcelona May days of 1937.

For those intrigued by Xena’s life, I have translated Víctor García’s two-part obituary, first published in Orto in 1989. I hope to publish it as a pamphlet with an afterword by myself and a prologue by Xena’s daughter, at some point in 2023.

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Much has been written about the municipalities as representative bodies of the population in any given territory. Today, when a social transformation is taking place in the shadow of war on the Iberian soil, the subject has gained in significance and must be given due attention.

From the days of July [1936] to the present, the workers’ organisations have shaped the formidable resistance to the fascist attack. Special circumstances, difficult to foresee, have resulted in these forces collaborating with others of a purely political character, whose history recalls for the revolutionary proletariat times of repression and the quashing of rights gained over many years of struggle.

Up to now the defence cadres of each organisation, along with a good part of the general population, have fought together against the forces of national and international fascism. This unity has given rise to a spirit of collaboration in the administrative and governmental bodies. There, the proletarian organisations represent the interests of working people exploited by the bourgeoisie, monitored by the state, and brutalised by religion. The political parties meanwhile represent both a fraction of the capitalist class and that section of popular opinion that the parties consider to be politically immature, incapable of organising society without the guidance of themselves and state legislators.  

Collaboration in the municipality, between representatives of such different organisations and tendencies, is causing a good deal of unease in the towns, and for the moment there is no solution in sight.

Today, just as yesterday, the town is the site of fundamentally opposed interests. The collective interest, tending towards the social, is contrary to the maintenance of private and individual interests and vice-versa. While a large section of the population attempts to solve the problems posed by the war and the economic transformation through libertarian federalist principles, other retrograde elements want to preserve the old forms of private property and make every effort to reconstruct the state that guarantees their power.

In this period of revolutionary and anti-fascist struggle, the representative institutions bear the imprint of the minorities that compose them. Thus, in some areas, the popular transformations take place without significant resistance, in others this resistance hinders their realisation, and in some places the municipality is governed by the same corrupt officials as before, albeit with a new political denomination.

The field is not well defined. On the one hand the parties pay lip service to a social transformation corresponding to the desire for freedom of the proletariat, on the other they defend the property of the rich and the petite-bourgeoisie.

The two positions are incompatible. In defending their revolutionary interests, the workers must necessarily clash with the conservatism of the political parties and the Marxists.

The municipality is where these antagonisms are playing out with greatest intensity. For our part we will not cease to demand clarity with regard to the ends pursued by each of the minorities that compose the anti-fascist movement. If they are a friend to the social transformation that enables the workers to free themselves from the yoke of exploitation and from the despotism of the state, they cannot prevent the workers from socialising the wealth of society and administering it for themselves, using the liquid reserves of the old possessing classes for their own self-defence.

Nor can it be accepted that the political parties manoeuvre to economically strangle those municipalities that are not constituted according to their own precepts.

Anarchists will always rise with maximum energy to defend municipal autonomy and the right of the organised workers to socialise their society.