Elmo, Joseph

During the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), anarchist groups were able to exert a
significant influence in revolutionary politics through agricultural and industrial
collectivization, communes, militia resistance, and participation in government. Many
historians have explained anarchism through the lens of ideology, a doctrine based upon a
structure of authority. This thesis, however, explains anarchist power and unity during the
Spanish Civil War as a matter of identity, as a meaningful sense of self. Spanish
anarchists defined themselves through the process of negation – the act of defining who
you are by defining what you are not – by their opposition to authority, to religion, to
feudalism, to capitalism and fascism, to communism, and to anarchism. The anarchists
also affirmed who they were as individuals and as communities through three values:
yearning for absolute freedom, the capacity for absolute fraternity removed from
centralized authority, and absolute egalitarianism – the unreserved equality of all
individuals.