The Agenda and texts of the Reports presented to the assembly of delegates representing approximately 27,000 workers at the First (official) Congress of the National Confederation of Labor, held in Barcelona in 1911, providing a glimpse of the doctrinal spectrum represented by the founders of the CNT and the most urgent concerns of the membership of the new organization, including the “rights and duties” of disabled members of the CNT, the creation of rationalist schools, the formation of itinerant propaganda squads, and the need for a daily newspaper.
In this pamphlet first published in Switzerland in 1959, Gaston Leval depicts a transitional society largely modeled on the Spanish collectives of 1936-39 characterized by: a confederal structure of vertically and horizontally integrated enterprise committees and industrial federations; economic planning; the use of “symbolic money” wages “to facilitate and regulate distribution”; the crucial importance of agriculture and thus the persistence of a certain amount of private property in the agricultural sector; the vital role of cooperatives; and the primacy of consumption over production.