This is one conception, (specific to its' historical period, before anyone suggests I am adhering to it as a programme!) from the Zabalaza site detailing the ideas of Abad De Santillan-
Two months before the Saragossa congress Diego Abad de Santillan had published a book, El Organismo Economico de la Revolucion (The Economic Organization of the Revolution). This outline of an economic structure drew a somewhat different inspiration from the Saragossa program.
Unlike many of his contemporaries, Santillan was not a rigid and sterile disciple of the great anarchists of the nineteenth century. He regretted that anarchist literature of the previous twenty-five or thirty years should have paid so little attention to the concrete problems of a new economy, and that it had not opened up original perspectives on the future. On the other hand, anarchism had produced a superabundance of works, in every language, going over and over an entirely abstract conception of liberty. Santillan compared this indigestible body of work with the reports presented to the national and international congresses of the First International, and the latter seemed to him the more brilliant for the comparison. He thought they had shown a very much better understanding of economic problems than had appeared in subsequent periods.
Santillan was not backward, but a true man of his times. He was aware that "the tremendous development of modern industry has created a whole series of new problems, which it was impossible to foresee at an earlier time." There is no question of going back to the Roman chariot or to primitive forms of artisan production. Economic insularity, a parochial way of thinking, the patria chica (little fatherland) dear to the hearts of rural Spaniards nostalgic for a golden age, the small-scale and medieval "free commune" of Kropotkin - all these must be relegated to a museum of antiquities. They are the vestiges of out-of-date communalist conceptions. No "free communes" can exist from the economic point of view: "Our ideal is the commune which is associated, federated, integrated into the total economy of the country, and of other countries in a state of revolution." To replace the single owner by a hydra-headed owner is not collectivism, is not self-management. The land, the factories, the mines, the means of transport are the product of the work of all and must be at the service of all. Nowadays the economy is neither local, nor even national, but world-wide. The characteristic feature of modern life is the cohesion of all the productive and distributive forces. "A socialized economy, directed and planned, is an imperative necessity and corresponds to the trend of development of the modern economic world."
Santillan foresaw the function of coordinating and planning as being carried out by a federal economic council, which would not be a political authority, but simply an organ of coordination, an economic and administrative regulator. Its directives would come from below, from the factory councils federated into trade union councils for different branches of industry, and into local economic councils. The federal council is thus at the receiving end of two chains of authority, one based on locality and the other on occupation. The organizations at the base provide it with statistics so that it will be aware of the real economic situation at any given moment. In this way it can spot major deficiencies, and determine the sectors in which new industries or crops are most urgently required. "The policemen will no longer be necessary when the supreme authority lies in figures and statistics." In such a system state coercion has no utility, is sterile, even impossible. The federal council sees to the propagation of new norms, the growth of interdependence between the regions and the formation of national solidarity. It stimulates research into new methods of work, new manufacturing processes, new agricultural techniques. It distributes labor from one region to another, from one branch of the economy to another.
There is no doubt that Santillan learned a great deal from the Russian Revolution. On the one hand, it taught him to beware of the danger of a resurgence of the state and bureaucratic apparatus; but, on the other, it taught him that a victorious revolution can not avoid passing through intermediate economic forms, [32] in which there survives for a time what Marx and Lenin call "bourgeois law." For instance, there could be no question of abolishing the banking and monetary system at one fell swoop. These institutions must be transformed and used as a temporary means of exchange to keep social life moving and prepare the way to new economic forms.
Santillan was to play an important part in the Spanish Revolution: he became, in turn, a member of the central committee of the anti-fascist militia (end of July 1936), a member of the Catalonian Economic Council (August 11), and Economics Minister of the Catalonian government (mid-December).
