Foreign News: Anarchism Without Beards

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Bolshevism is one thing and Anarchism is another. Last week Walter Duranty, No. 1 contemporary reporter on Bolshevism, had left Moscow to report in Barcelona upon Anarchism—the most interesting principle of Government to arise amid the civil war in Spain.

Barcelona is the capital of Catalonia, a Spanish district so strongly Separatist that four years ago it won from Madrid a partial independence recently made complete (TIME, Aug. 31). Last week there was a chance that the Catalonian Communists may get the upper hand and establish a Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Likewise there was a chance that momentarily powerless Luis Companys, the Left Republican President of Catalonia, may regain control. But for the time being Barcelona was in the hands of Anarchists and its interesting condition could therefore be described as Anarchy.

Anarchism, as non-technically defined by the Encyclopaedia Britannica, is "the name given to a principle or theory of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government, harmony in such a society being obtained not by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority, but by free agreements concluded between the various groups, territorial and professional, freely constituted for the sake of production and consumption, as also for the satisfaction of the infinite variety of needs and aspirations of a civilized being."

Under Anarchism there can be no Dictator such as Stalin, no President such as Roosevelt, in short no Bigwig. Hence Walter Duranty soon discovered and reported that all the Barcelona Anarchists he could find and interview "refused to be called leaders." Nevertheless, to Mr. Duranty's friendly eyes, the good people of Barcelona seemed to have, "with surprising ease and absence of disorder, established what is in fact if not in name a Regime of Workers."

Two Anarchists outstanding in fact if not in title in Barcelona are Buenaventura Durruti and Juan Garcia Oliver, both newly skyrocketed to fame from the looms of Barcelona textile plants. These smooth-shaven, intensely modern young men sufficiently dispose of the Victorian idea that Anarchism is an affair of terrifying beards. As a matter of fact, "The Father of Anarchism," the late great Pierre-Joseph Proudhon who died in 1865 had only a "Newgate Frill" (fringe of whiskers) around his placid countenance. The last of the internationally great Anarchist thinkers, Russian Prince Peter Kropotkin, who was the perfect prototype of "Bearded Anarchist", expired peacefully near Moscow in 1921. Not international thinkers but intensely local Barcelona doers by "direct action" are Newshawk Duranty's new news subjects. Anarchist Durruti goes so far as to scoff contemptuously at the Spanish Government, friendly though it is to Barcelona, charging that in the Cabinet there are ministers who secretly want Generalissimo Franco to take Madrid because they think that unless he does all Spain may go Anarchist.

"The difference between Catalonia and Russia," reported Mr. Duranty in the New York Times, "was strongly emphasized to me by [Anarchist] Garcia Oliver, a sturdy young man in his early thirties, wearing a militia uniform with a Sam Browne belt and a pistol on his hip. The scene was reminiscent of early revolutionary days in Petrograd.