Spanish Civil War: The Central Committee of Antifascist Militias of Catalonia is constituted, establishing an anarcho-syndicalist economy in Catalonia.

The Spanish Civil War was fought from 1936 to 1939 between the Republicans and the Nationalists. Republicans were loyal to the left-leaning Popular Front government of the Second Spanish Republic and included socialists, anarchists, communists and separatists. The opposing Nationalists who established the Spanish State were an alliance of fascist Falangists, monarchists, conservatives, and traditionalists supported by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy and led by a military junta among whom General Francisco Franco quickly achieved a preponderant role. Due to the international political climate at the time, the war was variously viewed as class struggle, a religious struggle, or a struggle between dictatorship and republican democracy, between revolution and counterrevolution, or between fascism and communism. The Nationalists won the war, which ended in early 1939, and ruled Spain until Franco's death in November 1975.

The Central Committee of Antifascist Militias of Catalonia was an administrative body created on 21 July 1936 by the president of the Government of Catalonia, Lluís Companys, under pressure by the anarcho-syndicalists of the National Confederation of Labor (CNT) and Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI), which led the workers' struggle against the July 1936 military uprising in Barcelona.

Anarcho-syndicalism is an anarchist organisational model that centres trade unions as a vehicle for class conflict. Drawing from the theory of libertarian socialism and the practice of syndicalism, anarcho-syndicalism sees trade unions as both a means to achieve immediate improvements to working conditions and to build towards a social revolution in the form of a general strike, with the ultimate aim of abolishing the state and capitalism. Anarcho-syndicalists consider trade unions to be the prefiguration of a post-capitalist society and seek to use them in order to establish workers' control of production and distribution. An anti-political ideology, anarcho-syndicalism rejects political parties and participation in parliamentary politics, considering them to be a corrupting influence on the labour movement. In order to achieve their material and economic goals, anarcho-syndicalists instead practice direct action in the form of strike actions, boycotts and sabotage. Anarcho-syndicalists also attempt to build solidarity among the working class, in order to unite workers against the exploitation of labour and build workers' self-management.