How were the Spanish industrial collectives coordinated?
The methods of cooperation tried by the collectives varied considerably. Initially, there were very few attempts to coordinate economic activities beyond the workplace. This is hardly surprising, given that the overwhelming need was to restart production, convert a civilian economy to a wartime one and to ensure that the civilian population and militias were supplied with necessary goods. This, unsurprisingly enough, lead to a situation of anarchist mutualism developing, with many collectives selling the product of their own labour on the market (in other words, a form of simple commodity production). This lead to some economic problems as there existed no framework of institutions between collectives to ensure efficient coordination of activity and so lead to pointless competition between collectives (which lead to even more problems). As there were initially no confederations of collectives nor mutual/communal banks this lead to the inequalities that initially existed between collect
