History Memes

"Decentralized workers' control" it was roving gangs and militias.

During the first weeks of the war, courts of law were replaced by revolutionary tribunals and extrajudicial killings by militants and vigilantes soon followed:

Everybody created his own justice and administered it himself...Some used to call this 'taking a person for a ride' [paseo] but I maintain that it was justice administered directly by the people in the complete absence of the regular judicial bodies.

During the initial fighting several thousand individuals were executed by anarchist and socialist militants based on their assumed political allegiance and social class:

We do not wish to deny that the nineteenth of July brought with it an overflowing of passions and abuses, a natural phenomenon of the transfer of power from the hands of privileged to the hands of the people. It is possible that our victory resulted in the death by violence of four or five thousand inhabitants of Catalonia who were listed as rightists and were linked to political or ecclesiastical reaction.

They also fit squarely in the "bunch of ghouls" category.