Who Got to Drive the Trams
In the summer of 1936, the trams in Barcelona kept running. So did the phone exchange, the bakeries, and most of the factories in Catalonia. Workers had taken them over. There was no owner giving orders and no manager approving schedules, but there were schedules, and there were rules about who worked which shift, how wages were set, and how disputes got resolved. Nobody flattened the org chart and waited to see what happened next. People still had to decide who drove which route and who covered for who when someone got sick, and they did it without anyone holding the power to fire them for getting it wrong.
Ask who actually drove those trams and the honest answer is: men. The collectives running the city’s transit, its factories, its phone exchange, were leaderless in the sense that mattered to the men running them. Removing the boss didn’t remove the argument over who gets heard. It just changed who had to keep having it, and how loud they had to get before anyone with power noticed.
A year earlier, a group of anarchist women in Barcelona had already seen this coming. In 1934, women inside the CNT, including Soledad Estorach, founded the Grupo Cultural Femenino, because the union that was supposedly building a world without rulers still ran on the same assumption every hierarchy runs on, that women’s labor was support work, and support work didn’t get a vote. When the national organization Mujeres Libres formed in Madrid in 1936, the Barcelona group folded into it that fall rather than starting over, because they’d already done the harder part, which was recognizing that no bosses was not the same claim as no one left out.
Mujeres Libres said their goal plainly. They wanted to end what they called the triple enslavement of women: to ignorance, as producers, and as women. That third category doesn’t name a man in the room, but it doesn’t need to. Being enslaved “as a woman” inside a movement that had just abolished bosses is its own quiet indictment. Nobody had to write a man’s name into the founding document for the problem to be about the men standing next to them. By 1936 the organization had grown into a national federation, and within a few years it counted its membership in the tens of thousands, which is not the size of a marginal complaint. It’s the size of a structural one.
David Graeber spent a career studying why hierarchy survives long after the people inside it stop believing in it, and he landed on the mechanism at work here. The people on top of a structure don’t need to understand the people underneath them, because their position doesn’t depend on that understanding. It’s the people with the least power who have to become experts in reading everyone above them, since their survival depends on it. Structural power doesn’t require knowledge. It runs fine on ignorance, as long as the ignorance sits at the top.
That’s what the women of the Grupo Cultural Femenino were up against, and it’s the mechanism behind any structure where the tension between self and group gets resolved by default instead of on purpose. Remove the boss and the ignorance doesn’t disappear. It just stops having a title.
Emma Goldman spent decades in and out of courtrooms, jails, and deportation hearings arguing that individual freedom and collective responsibility weren’t opposites. Real autonomy doesn’t come from standing apart from other people. It comes from the ability to shape the conditions you live under together with them, which is a kind of sovereignty no isolated individual can build alone. You can’t out-argue a landlord by yourself. You can with a tenant union. You can’t out-argue a movement that won’t take your labor seriously by yourself either, which is the exact position the founders of Mujeres Libres were in, and the exact reason they built a second organization instead of waiting to be heard inside the first one.
This is not a story about anarchism failing women. It’s a story about what no rulers actually requires, which is more work than removing the boss. The trams ran on schedule. Whether the women who kept the city fed and clothed while the men debated theory got an equal vote in that schedule was never automatic. It had to be organized, argued, and built, separately, by the people it wasn’t automatically extended to.
The trams could not have run without them. Not symbolically, literally. Someone had to feed the men driving the routes, watch the children while their mothers worked the switchboard, keep the wounded fed once the fighting started a few weeks later. Barcelona’s revolution ran on that labor the same way it ran on diesel and copper wire, and it would have stopped within a week without it. That should sting a little. It means every version of this story that leaves women out was never describing what actually happened, only what men happened to notice. But there’s something else sitting right next to the sting, and it’s just as true. If the whole apparatus depended on them that completely, then the trams didn’t run despite the women, and they didn’t run because the men allowed them to. They ran because women kept deciding, every single day, to keep them running, with or without a vote in how any of it got organized. That’s not a consolation. That’s the actual center of the story, misplaced for ninety years.