The deep memory has a name: the CNT. The Confederación Nacional del Trabajo — anarcho-syndicalist, federated, assembly-based; at its 1930s peak, over a million members in Catalonia. The CNT-FAI ran Barcelona in 1936. Taking it down took fascists and Communists, both — Franco's army from outside the Republic, and inside the Republic the Stalinist-aligned forces attacking the anarchist and POUM positions in Barcelona's May Days of 1937. Different uniforms, same intention. By the time the war ended, what was left of the CNT was driven underground, killed off, scattered into exile.
The form survived. Murray Bookchin took his lessons from it and called the practice libertarian municipalism. The Barcelona coalitions of the twenty-first century take theirs from the same place.
The CNT was Spain's part of a wider European left of the 1920s and 30s — Gramsci writing in a Mussolini prison, Reich in Berlin naming the somatic-political fascism of the era. The CNT was the part of that generation that built the most actual power. They lost by being defeated, not by being wrong.
Franco died in 1975. What followed was not revolution but constitutional design.
The 1978 Spanish Constitution, ratified in referendum, established a parliamentary monarchy and a system of autonomous communities: power devolved to seventeen regional governments, each with its own statute, parliament, and competencies. Catalonia got its 1979 Statute of Autonomy — education, language policy, health, urban planning, much of policing and cultural life. Spain became a quasi-federal state by another name.
This was the institutional opening. A city suppressed for forty years now had a regional government that could be its own argument with Madrid. The Catalan language returned to schools, signs, and television. The Generalitat — the historic Catalan government, dissolved by Franco in 1939 — was restored.
The transition wasn't perfect. It preserved much of the Franco-era state apparatus, kept the king the regime had positioned, gave amnesty to officials who had committed atrocities. Spanish democracy carries the compromise. But the autonomous community structure is real, and Barcelona's twenty-first-century coalitions could only happen in the space it opened.
This was also the moment of Negri and Deleuze-Guattari — the post-1968 left thinking past party politics toward distributed power, multitude, the political subject as a composition of singularities. The death of Franco landed in that moment. Spain wrote its new constitution into a theoretical environment already imagining new forms of political subjecthood.
This kind of coalition is not generated from nothing. Barcelona's working class has been organizing itself for a long time, and the city remembers.
In 1936, when Franco's forces moved against the elected government, Barcelona was the place where the people most decisively did not let them in. Anarchist unions and antifascist militias ran the city. Factories were collectivized. The trams kept running, the trains kept running, the bread kept getting baked — under workers' councils, not bosses. It was a real social revolution, and Franco needed three years and the collapse of international solidarity to defeat it. The city fell in January 1939.
What followed was forty years of dictatorship: executions, exile, the Catalan language banned in schools and the press, neighborhood organizations driven underground. But the memory did not die. It survived in kitchen tables, in songs, in the persistence of the language under suppression, in the slow rebuilding of cultural infrastructure after Franco's death in 1975.
When the assemblies of Barcelona en Comú began meeting in 2014, they were not inventing a new form. They were activating an old one. The neighborhood assemblies of the twenty-first century rhyme with the workers' assemblies of 1936 because they come out of the same city, the same memory, the same refusal.
By February of 1941, much of this had been suppressed or scattered. Franco's regime had outlawed the Basque language in public life. Mondragón — Arrasate in Basque — had been on the Republican side in the Civil War, and the Basques had been a center of resistance: Guernica had been bombed in 1937, and the parish priest in Mondragón itself had been shot. The years that followed were called by the people who lived through them los años del hambre, the years of hunger. Spain's autarky kept imports out, the Basque industrial valleys ran below capacity, and the cooperative and self-help organizations that had long woven through Basque life had, in the words of one history, "died away after the war." What remained were the words: etxe, auzolan, lehen auzoa. And the practices the words named, dormant under suppression but not gone.
In July 1936, Francisco Franco launched a fascist military coup against the Spanish Republic. In Catalonia and Aragon, workers and peasants didn't wait for a party directive.
In Barcelona, workers took over the trams and kept them running — under workers' control, with elected management committees, fares reduced to a flat rate anyone could afford. The precision engineering workshops that had made Barcelona one of Europe's industrial centers were collectivized and converted for war production. In the Aragon countryside, hundreds of villages collectivized their land — not under compulsion but by assembly, by the communities that had worked it deciding collectively how it would be governed. The CNT, the anarcho-syndicalist labor union with over a million members, provided the organizational framework.
It was not primarily Franco who destroyed it. The Spanish Communist Party — a Comintern affiliate, directed by Moscow, literally the same international organization that had dismantled the Russian soviets fifteen years earlier — systematically dismantled the revolutionary collectives in the name of building a unified front against fascism. The pragmatic argument: you can't fight a modern war with anarchist militias. The collectives were dissolved. Anarchist leaders were arrested and in some cases killed — by their ostensible allies.