It featured takeover of power at local levels by the Spanish workers' organizations and social movements, seizure and reorganization of economic facilities directed by trade union groups and local committees, and widespread implementation[3] of socialist, more narrowly, libertarian socialist and anarchist[citation needed] organizational principles throughout various portions of the Republican zone, primarily Catalonia, Aragon, Andalusia, and parts of the Valencian Community.

The arrival, on the one hand, of the thousands of anarchist militiamen from Catalonia and Valencia, and the existence, on the other, of a large rural Aragonese popular base allowed for the progressive development of the largest collectivist experiment of the revolution.

[8] The British author George Orwell, best known for his anti-authoritarian works Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, was a soldier in the Lenin Division of the CNT-allied Partido Obrero Unificación Marxista (POUM; Workers' Party of Marxist Unification).

One of its main developments was the Unified Levantine Council for Agricultural Export (Catalan: Consell Llevantí Unificat d'Exportació Agrícola, CLUEA) and the total socialization of the industries and services of the city of Alcoy.

Numerous rationalist schools were founded, which expanded the existing offers of athenaeums and union centers and in which the educational postulates of Francesc Ferrer i Guardia, Ricardo Mella, Leo Tolstoy, and Maria Montessori were carried out.

The anti-fascist Carlo Rosselli, who before Mussolini's accession to power was professor of economics in the University of Genoa, put his judgment in the following words: In three months Catalonia has been able to set up a new social order on the ruins of an ancient system.

A new world was born with them, and it is a joy to serve that world.But despite the de facto decomposition of state power, on August 2 the government took one of its first measures to regain control against the revolution, with the creation of the Volunteer Battalions, the embryo of the Spanish Republican Army.

They believed that the war was an extension of class struggle, and that the proletariat had defeated the military precisely because of this revolutionary impulse that they had been carrying for years and not because of defending a bourgeois republic.

An exception was the consolidation of the collectivist process in Aragon, where thousands of libertarian militiamen from Valencia and Catalonia arrived, and where, before the start of the Civil War, there was the most important anarcho-syndicalist labor base affiliated with the CNT in all of Spain.

During this month, the Iron Column decided to briefly take Valencia, in protest at the shortage of supplies provided by the Popular Executive Committee, subsequently leading to clashes in the streets of the city between libertarian militias and communist groups, leaving more than 30 dead.

During this stage, the government definitely controlled the anarchist popular militias, dissolving them so that they were compulsorily integrated into the Spanish Republican Army, which was under the command of professional officers.

In this month, the central government also ordered the dissolution of the Aragón Defense Council, practically the last remaining body of revolutionary power, which was militarily occupied by republican army troops on August 10.

[24] In Spain during almost three years, despite a civil war that took a million lives, despite the opposition of the political parties (republicans, left and right Catalan separatists, socialists, Communists, Basque and Valencian regionalists, petty bourgeoisie, etc.

Andrea Oltmares, professor in the University of Geneva, in the course of an address of some length, said: "In the midst of the civil war the Anarchists have proved themselves to be political organizers of the first rank.

Railways, tramcars and buses, taxicabs and shipping, electric light and power companies, gasworks and waterworks, engineering and automobile assembly plants, mines and cement works, textile mills and paper factories, electrical and chemical concerns, glass bottle factories and perfumeries, food-processing plants and breweries, as well as a host of other enterprises, were confiscated or controlled by workmen's committees, either term possessing for the owners almost equal significance in practice.

After the coup d'état and the beginning of the civil war, many owners in the republican zone were assassinated, imprisoned, or exiled, thus leaving a multitude of companies and factories without direction.

These differences radiated from numerous factors: the disappearance of the owner, the strength and political orientation of the workers' organizations, the existence of foreign capital in the company itself, or even the destination of its products.

[33] In this case, management fell to a board of directors made up of less than fifteen people, in which all the productive and service levels of the company were involved, and in which the trade union centrals had to be proportionally represented.

There was no unity of criteria in the creative process, dogmatism was not allowed behind the scenes, and the "seventh art" incorporated a new form of journalism by taking cameras out into the street, to film what was happening there.

Anarchist film production was a large part of the creative life in Catalonia at the time; and it spread to Aragon, Madrid, and Levante through different models, adapting to the circumstances of towns and cities and the working people who made them possible.

[45] They began by seizing the companies, and through a general plan to rationalize efforts and resources, they closed the workshops that did not meet sufficient health and safety conditions, regrouping them to have large and clear premises.

Thus, as a result of the coup d'état, a revolutionary process began in which the peasants expropriated from the landowners and organized self-managed communities based on collective ownership of the means of production.

The business role was joined to that of an institution that replaced the local powers of the municipalities in which they were created, in many cases abolishing money and private property (one of the principles of socialist anarchist society).

Locally produced goods, if abundant, such as bread, wine, and olive oil, were distributed freely, while other articles could be obtained by means of coupons at the communal depot.

[69] Various communities also carried out other initiatives, such as the creation of libraries, artistic activities, a cinema forum,[70] theater groups, athenaeums,[71] the foundation of its own academies,[72] or nursery schools.

[74] The coincidence of the revolution and the Spanish Civil War meant that in the military field various initiatives avre developed coordinated by the new administrations established by the revolutionary wave, most of which would be unsuccessful.

[82] Although CNT-FAI publications cited numerous cases of peasant proprietors and tenant farmers who had adhered voluntarily to the collective system, there can be no doubt that an incomparably larger number doggedly opposed it or accepted it only under extreme duress...The fact is...that many small owners and tenant farmers were forced to join the collective farms before they had an opportunity to make up their minds freely.He also emphasizes the generally coercive nature of the war climate and anarchist military organization and presence in many portions of the countryside as being an element in the establishment of collectivization, even if outright force or blatant coercion was not used to bind participants against their will.

[83] Even if the peasant proprietor and tenant farmer were not compelled to adhere to the collective system, there were several factors that made life difficult for recalcitrants; for not only were they prevented from employing hired labor and disposing freely as their crops, as has already been seen, but they were often denied all benefits enjoyed by members...Moreover, the tenant farmer, who had believed himself freed from the payment of rent by the execution or flight of the landowner or of his steward, was often compelled to continue such payment to the village committee.

Obligatory collectivization was justified, in some libertarians' eyes, by a reasoning closer to war communism than to libertarian communism: the need to feed the columns at the front.Anarchist sympathizers counter that the presence of a "coercive climate" was an unavoidable aspect of the war that the anarchists cannot be fairly blamed for, and that the presence of deliberate coercion or direct force was minimal, as evidenced by a generally peaceful mixture of collectivists and individualist dissenters who had opted not to participate in collective organization.

[92] He reserved his strongest condemnation for the Stalinist-allied Communist party for their repressive actions of other left-wing factions which ensured the ascendancy of Franco and the Comintern for abandoning the revolution in favour of maintaining diplomatic parity with the West.