The 1930s in Spain was a time of open class warfare, and the most exploited and radical of the sectors in struggle was the rural working class, which accounted for three of the twenty-three million inhabitants of what was still a predominantly agrarian nation. In an epoch when the country appeared trapped in a cul-de-sac of economic and political backwardness, more than any other sector these ‘workers in sandals’ (Claudín: 1983b) raised the spectre of popular revolution; and it was they who provided the mass of popular support for the credo of Andalucían anarchism. So it is tempting to see the social struggle in El Marco de Jerez as a continuation of this ideological tradition into the very different economic and political context of the forced accumulation and State-led industrialization of the Franco years; and consequently to argue that, whatever its intrinsic interest, it is something of an anachronism in an historical moment which sees the creation of a new industrial working class and a new class of industrial capitalists (see Chapter 4).