"Anarchism and The City," by Chris Ealham

Anarchism and the City: Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Barcelona, 1898-1937decodes Barcelona's urban landscape for reasons behind the unlikely rise to power of anarchist elements in those years preceding the Spanish Republic and the civil war that consumed it.

Chris Ealham brings an urbanist's tools to this interesting proposition, positing sometimes insightful, other times idealistic, explanations to questions about the Confederacion Nacional de Trabajo's (CNT) season of sway over Europe's then-most productive city.

Academic in style, "City," serves up enough good stuff to offset the loss of momentum resulting from the historian's job of stringing evidence from various sources and affixing them to each other with footnote glue.

Ealham documents the geographic reordering of Barcelona as undesirable immigrants from the south of Spain swelled its working class in an era when the city was considered "Europe's factory."

Viewed as something "other" (the author proposes), as fomenters of vice and carriers of disease, this surging class of workers was subjected to a bourgeois reordering of the urban terrain that isolated and marginalized.

Ealham's view is that, left unto themselves, the working class folk of Barcelona wove themselves into a collection of tight units clear on what the issues facing them were and how to address them.

For a while, the anarchist policy guys showed real prowess in organizing neighborhoods, winning their loyalty to the CNT unions' causes, and channeling a universal resentment against the existing order.

Then they put that existing order to work for them:

"Making full use of improvements in the transport system and the growing availability of bicycles, and backed by the Barcelona CNT's paper, Solidaridad Obrera, which played an essential auxiliary role, advertising union meetings, talks and social activities across the city, the local federation would receive feedback from, and send instructions to, the comites with the great speed. This enabled the CNT to respond swiftly to events on the ground and generally mount a more sustained and coordinated opposition to capitalism."

A big policy winner for the CNT was embracing the despised Andalusian and Murcian migrant laborers, and other groups not found on the industrial shop floor.

"Ever ready to mobilize beyond the factory proletariat," Ealham writes, "the radicals applauded street gangs as a vanguard force in the fight against the police."

Harassed ambulant street vendors and the unemployed alike also responded when the
CNT called for action; action that transcended the workplace and transformed the streets.

The union and its minions expanded public space, cultivating working class interaction that produced a dense web of community relations only a civil war sunder.

As its title suggests, this is about the CNT in Barcelona, even though the union's influence stretched well-beyond Catalonia's borders. There the organization thrived under the conditions so painstakingly detailed by Ealham, and did so in its own way.

Resorting to violence didn't hurt.

The author quotes one source as saying, "This was an original type of criminality that was typically Barcelonese. The anarchist robbers of Barcelona are nothing less than the Catalan equivalents of Al Capone...Today it is the fashion among all thieves, pickpockets and swindlers to pass themselves off as anarchists."

"Anarchism and The City" was published by AK Press, an anarchist imprint, and Ealham, while maintaining a balanced tone throughout, is okay with the idea that, at some point, a people being exploited have the right, are obligated by the dictates of survival, to kill the guy who is killing them.

It's a chicken-or-the-egg quandary. For Ealham, the question of whether the anarchists and their constituency had any choice in the matter of violence is worthy of a deeper consideration.

In his examination of how the loosely structured union federation interacted with the working class barris, the relation to and impact of the Federacion Anarquista de Iberia (FAI) upon the CNT, and how shadowy associate groups used the gun to "appropriate" banks and erase political enemies, Ealham's efforts are first-class.

It's fascinating stuff that renders Spanish anarchism more understandable, if not completely dispelling the notion the rank-and-filers were a little nutty, or appear so thanks to their disparate ideas for reorganizing society.

Noting that the anarchist revolution was the first of its kind in the automotive era, the author observes how workers were seized by an "irrationality" after appropriating the cars of the merchant and capital classes.

"But revolutionary motoring possessed its own logic," Ealham writes. "In the first instance, the destruction of cars reflected a desire to usher in a new set of spatial relations as well as resistance to the attempts by the local and central Republican authorities to impose a new urban order of controlled consumption, consisting of new rules of circulation and traffic lights designed to improve the flow of capital and goods."

Or not.

Rather than ushering in new spatial relations the armed workers may have just been having a crazy time in cars. It happens, you know.

He observes that, "On the day after the birth of the Republic, as a gesture of solidarity, the Barcelona CNT declared a general strike that affected all branches of industry apart from the essential food and transport services."

The Republic/Spanish Civil War epoch is akin to a family fight and the multi-sided affair can tug at one's loyalties depending upon which side's version is being aired.

Read the well-written diaries of Republican leader Miguel Azana and savor the portrait of a rational, intelligent and literate man burdened with allies and governing copartners bent on overthrowing the enterprise he's been elected to lead.

It's hard to imagine Azana viewing the general strike as a gesture in solidarity.

While sympathetic, Ealham is not so blind as to ignore the fact that, as anarchists and their allies launched a revolution in red Asturias they hoped would throughout the Iberian peninsula, "Francisco Ascaso, 'Nosotros' member [an anarchist affinity group] and secretary of the Catalan CRT, issued a call to the Barcelona proletariat to return to work from a radio station controlled by the Spanish army."

My revolution, not yours, you see.

The anarchists thrived for a season as the CNT, FAI and related groupings were wonderful at forging a cohesive culture and strategy for the beleaguered barris residents. But Ealham lifts the lid on the corner committee meeting and details the inner-workings, the feuds, and fault lines that hampered the movement.

Ealham spends less time on the CNT's temporary reign over the streets of Barcelona after fascist generals rose up to destroy the Republic. And he does well in eschewing too detailed a rendering of those events, because that is much-tilled terrain.

The real triumph of "Anarchism and The City" is its fulfilling the title's pledge. Showing how a metropolis's geographical configuration, industrial bent, and raw social arrangements made a bed comfortable enough for some very unique individuals to sleep in.

"William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary" by E.P. Thompson

"History has remembered the kings and warriors because they destroyed; Art has remembered the people because they created."
William Morris

William Morris sits atop the house of history like a weathervane turning against the prevailing winds rather than with them.

One of the earliest British socialists, he abhorred modernity. An entrepreneurial spirit of manifold passions, he preferred the middle ages to the Renaissance.

To the manor born (1834), cultivated as an effete poet with other rich and eccentric boys (Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti) of the "Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood" at Oxford, Morris spent his middle- and old age calling for revolution from street corners in working class districts of London.

This essay is derived from a book written long ago, 1955 to be exact, by E.P. Thompson entitled, "William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary".

A citizen of Victorian England's roaring industrial empire, Morris could not abide by the times and spent his youth fancying life in the olden days; crafting poems in the style of Lord Alfred Tennyson replete with knights errant and creamy damsels making loving in limpid streambeds.

The society he loathed lauded him, blessed him with the poet's special fame, and validated the writings through which he sought to escape contemporary surroundings.

His Medievalism, Thompson wrote, was typical of the late-Romantic period in mid-nineteenth century England, an impulsive revolt against the Railway Age that hailed an older society of finer values than profit and capital utility.

Departed from academia Morris built "Red House," with an eye to infusing architecture with something of the Romantic revolt; adapting "late Gothic methods of building to the needs of the nineteenth century," said Thompson.

A visitor to Red House in 1863 describe it thusly:

"The deep red colour, the great sloping, tiled roofs; the small-paned widows; the low, wide porch and massive door; the surrounding garden divided into many squares, hedged by sweetbriar or wild rose, each enclosure with its own particular show of flowers; on this side a green alley with a bowling green, on that orchard walks amid gnarled old fruit-trees; all struck me as vividly picturesque and uniquely original."

Formation of his firm Morris & Co., followed, as he and his partners set out to establish a company of artisans with an eye to reviving the minor arts in England in, "an age of shoddy," according to Thompson.

Medievalism again provided the recipe.

"I have tried," Morris wrote, "to produce goods which should be genuine so far as their mere substances are concerned, and should have on that account the primary beauty in them which belongs to naturally treated substances: have tried for instance to make woollen substances as woollen as possible, cotton as cotton as possible, and so on; have used only the dyes which are natural and simple, because they produce beauty almost without the intervention of art; all this quite apart from the design of stuffs and whatnot."

Glass-firing, woodcutting, bookbinding, pottery, tile-glazing, weaving, embroidery and tapestry all came in for study under his industrious gaze.

He labored, with mixed success, to erase the line separating designer from studio craftsman so that the firm's employees might tap their own creative abilities and thereby alleviate the more grinding aspects of the work.

The venture was met with professional hostility as the product of intruders lacking commercial credentials, but soon enough forced its goal of challenging the reigning principles in decorative art.

Again, the wealthy social creatures Morris loathed bucked up his bank account and acclaimed his creations.

Never grateful, Morris found himself pushed; first toward the ineffectual liberalism of William Gladstone; and finally toward Marx as the Victorian era lurched deeper into violent foreign adventurism and greater abuse of working people.

"We are," he wrote, "living in an epoch when there is combat between commercialism, or the system of reckless waste, and communism, or the system of neighborly common sense."

Bet you never heard it put that way before.

Morris' communism was not the mid-century brand the mature among us became familiar with; the collective mass crushing the beleaguered individual.

A walking paradox, his collectivist vision could not be distinguished from his approach to the arts and was focused upon the individual; guaranteed the single person rights and comforts and, most importantly, the fullest realization of one's talents.

"Education," readers of his socialist tribune, Justice, were told, "must of necessity cease to be a preparation for a life of commercial success on the one hand, or of irresponsible labour on the other. It will become rather a habit of making the best of the individual's powers in all directions to which he is led by his innate disposition; so that no man will ever 'finish' his education while he is alive."

The revolution he foresaw would restore a pre-industrial community still in existence, but ravaged by the commercial Mammon to which every able body was obligated to consummate itself.

His Socialist miracle did not propose the erection of a new structure upon the old, rather reinforced that which had been weakened by economic materialism:

"That true society of loved and lover, parent and child, friend and friend, the society of well-wishers, of reasonable people conscious of the aspirations of humanity and of the duties we owe it through one another..."

His biographer observed that Morris' utopia called for the reestablishment of the personal and voluntary bonds of society and a doing away with the "impersonal and compulsive" relations rooted in a rule by the owners of property.

His thoughts, mostly old and long-forgotten, bear a contemporary ring in many passages.

"Civilization," Morris said, "is simply an organized injustice, a mere instrument for oppression, so much the worse than that which has gone before it, as its pretensions are higher, its slavery subtler, its mastery hard to overthrow because it is supported by such a dense mass of commonplace well-being and comfort."

His alternative served those to the right and left, secular and devout alike. It entailed a "remedy to be found in the simplification of life and the curbing of luxury and the desires for tyranny and mastery it gives birth to."

So much of his effort would be lost in the silly, internecine debates that have come to characterize left-wing politics. He endured and played a leading role in the split of the original Socialist League, fought the idea of running labor candidates for politics until that became the chosen road and bent to it again.

He fought the anarchists of Prince Kropotkin on one side, acolytes of the still-living Freidrich Hegel, on another, and the Fabian Socialists of George Bernard Shaw to his right.

He was caught in a terrible "Bloody Sunday" police riot in London, which caused a severe curtailing of his belief in the ability of civil movements (read: unarmed) to bring about revolutionary change, and spent himself silly on the "Justice" publication until he was rudely moved off its board of editors by men of different mien.

He died in his sixties, spent with efforts in so many of life's theaters, his legacy in poetry secure, his influence upon design engrained in the minds of those who launched the Bauhaus, the force of his belief in the working man evident in the gains made over the ensuing century.

Said the poet William Butler Yeats of Morris, "No man I have known was so well loved; you saw him producing everywhere organization and beauty, seeming almost in the same instant, helpless and triumphant."

And that is living.