Collectivities was the name given in Spanish, until the Spanish Revolution, to cooperatives - both producers' and consumers' - and communally run holdings set up by workers. During the Revolution the term was extended to the organizations that spontaneously organized the production and distribution of goods in an attempt to supply the militias but, above all, to abolish wage labor from its base and to try out a productive metabolism centered on the direct satisfaction of human needs.
From the first cooperatives to the Spanish Revolution
While consumers' cooperatives were considered collectivities, groupings of smallholders or stockbreeders and industrial associations were not considered collectivities. In that sense collectivity is much more precise and at the same time broader than cooperative. It embraces both producers' and consumers' cooperatives, but leaves out cooperatives of businesses and proprietors.
It was collectivities that set up the first workers' education and health systems in the 19th century, that built the people's houses in the early 20th century, and that financed a good part of the great industrial strikes.
In addition, during the years of the revolution (1936-37) the name collectivities was given to the organizations that spontaneously organized the production and distribution of goods in an attempt to supply the militias but, above all, to abolish wage labor from its base and to try out a productive metabolism centered on the direct satisfaction of human needs.
This second meaning is actually the one that gives the term its full sense, by revealing the deep intentions and goals of the experiences that preceded it. In fact, during the Spanish Revolution, in most cases it was old collectivities of day laborers - which in towns like Llerena integrated consumption and production - that served as the skeleton for the district-wide and whole-village collectivities that, from July 19 onwards, abolished wages and proceeded to distribute food and basic necessities according to the needs of each family.
Viewed in perspective, the collectivities were an important building block for the organization of the working class during its rise as a political subject, and the starting point from which, in the Revolution, it attempted to take over the productive apparatus in order to overcome its capitalist organization.
The collectivities in the Spanish Revolution
Within the framework of the Revolution, the collectivities became a moment of the seizure of the productive apparatus by the workers.
The expropriation of capitalism by workers and peasants must necessarily begin, as in Spain, with the workers taking possession of the economic units as they exist. In the countryside, which lacks the cellular agglutination of industry, grouping occurs spontaneously on the basis of villages and districts possessing a certain unity. It is the starting point of socialist property, but not socialist property itself. It is group property. That was the main defect of the collectivities, which the reactionary combination of Stalinists, reformists and bourgeois exploited to expropriate the proletariat.
The collectivities spread throughout the country, in countryside and city, immediately after July. Against them too, the enemies of the revolution did not launch their attack until they felt protected by sufficient armed forces. Worker and peasant property was generally recognized as a fait accompli.
G. Munis. Property (Chapter VIII of "Jalones de derrota, promesa de victoria"), 1947
But beware: it is a moment in a dynamic process. It is the totality - the political and social revolution - that gives it meaning. But group ownership - which is what a collectivity is - is only that, a moment; it is not socialism in itself, nor revolutionary in itself, not even by virtue of attacking the commodification of labor power.
Group property cannot be more than a moment in the socialist transformation of production. It cannot possibly be retained for longer than the minimum time necessary for the workers in possession of the former capitalist enterprises to articulate all production and consumption on a national scale.
The intention of the proletariat and peasants in expropriating the bourgeoisie was in no way to become owners themselves, but to create the socialist economy.
The very experience of the collectivities led them to understand that these should be the starting point of a nationwide organization of production and distribution.
The socialist economy must always set itself two main objectives: to satisfy the needs of the poor population and to make the fullest use of all natural resources and technical possibilities. The latter constitutes the basis for satisfying the needs of the poor population and, developed on an international scale, must create the conditions for the complete disappearance of classes and of the State.
A task impossible to accomplish without planning the economy, without which it is not even possible to take advantage of all the productivity that modern technology allows. The seizure and setting in motion of the production centers by their respective workers was an obligatory first step. Stopping there was bound to prove disastrous.
G. Munis. Property (Chapter VIII of "Jalones de derrota, promesa de victoria"), 1947
The collectivities are the spearhead not only of the day laborers (proletariat), but also of the independent peasantry living at subsistence level or, at least, without wage-earners.
Defeat does not detract from the example set by the peasants. Until now, the alliance of the peasants with the proletariat, particularly in countries with remnants of feudal agrarian organization, was posed on unequal ground.
On the industrial and urban terrain, expropriation of the bourgeoisie (socialist measures); in the countryside, distribution of land to the peasants (bourgeois-democratic measures). The Spanish revolution has revealed that the alliance of the proletariat and the peasants can be posed, at least in Spain, on a socialist basis. The technical insufficiencies of the country can be provisionally made up for by the revolutionary sufficiency of the peasantry.
The socialist lucidity of the Aragonese peasants went so far as to understand the need for economic coordination between their collectivities and the industrial collectivities of the proletariat. The first initiative in that direction came from the countryside, proposing a single system of production and administration for all the collectivities.
Through their own experience, the idea also imposed itself on the industrial collectivities. But it was absolutely impossible to carry out without the full possession of political power by the proletariat and the peasants. By the time the idea had become more or less clear, the capitalist State was already expropriating the proletariat, and its weapons, its organs of power and its revolutionary energy had been destroyed in May.
G. Munis. Property (Chapter VIII of "Jalones de derrota, promesa de victoria"), 1947
Finally, one must not fall for the manipulation and reinterpretation - constant after 1968 - of the workers' collectivizations and the day laborers' and peasants' collectivities as "self-management."
The collectivities of 1936-37 in Spain are not a case of self-management avant la lettre. Some organized a sort of local communism with no commodity relations other than with the outside, precisely like the ancient societies of primitive communism. Others were trade or village cooperatives, whose members shared out among themselves the former profits of capital. All of them more or less abandoned the remuneration of workers according to the laws of the labor power market, as well as, some more than others, according to the necessary labor and surplus labor from which capital draws surplus value and the whole substance of its social organization. Moreover, the collectivities made gifts in kind to the combat militias, as abundant as they were repeated.
The collectivities can therefore be defined only by their revolutionary characteristics, in short, by their system of production and distribution in rupture with the capitalist notions of value (necessarily exchange value), autonomy of management being a mere form in contradiction with their deep content. So much so that it was not only the cause of their difficulties, but what allowed Stalinism and the government subservient to it to fight them and finally destroy them. Autonomy of management was thus the negation of the collectivities. They themselves realized it, but too late.
G. Munis. Letter of protest to the journal "Autogestion et Socialisme" (1972)