The opportunity of achieving a fully developed bourgeois democracy had been missed. The new ruling bloc, based essentially on agrarian interests, controlled the Spanish state for the next forty-eight years, from 1875 to 1923. In the course of the preceding liberal struggle against the economic foundations of the ancien régime, the pattern of land ownership had fundamentally changed. Church, noble and common lands had been disentailed, put on the market and, in the main, been purchased by the bourgeoisie and a part of the old landowning class. Many of the large estates (latifundia) of the south and south-west were created in this period. In the course of a century, the bourgeoisie continued to extend its holdings until, by the 1930s, approximately 90 per cent of Spain’s farm land was in its hands, the rest being owned by the upper nobility. The liberals’ mid-nineteenth-century hope (which was not alone in motivating their disentailment laws) that a new, small and prosperous peasantry could be created by these means was disappointed.
Given the bourgeoisie’s extensive stake in the land, it was not surprising that the new ruling bloc should be dominated by an agrarian oligarchy. A manipulated electoral system kept it in power under the restored monarchy, while excluding peasantry and proletariat from representation. With parliament not even formally expressing the nation’s will, the ruling class could not rely on even an attenuated form of political consensus to avert grave crises which involved those who were politically excluded; more direct police methods had to be used. Not surprisingly, it failed to produce an ideology which would ‘incorporate’ these excluded classes. Much of the widespread working class ‘a-politicism’ to which anarchism could appeal stemmed from, or was reinforced by, that exclusion.
This pseudo-parliamentary democracy bought a temporary social peace for the ruling class; but it was at a price. The dominance of agrarian interests and their refusal to ‘modernize’ agriculture placed obstacles in the way of industrial development. Adopting the mode of their predecessors, the new capitalist landowners failed to invest in their estates. ‘The psychology of feudalism outlived its juridical disappearance.’3 Lack of investment and low wages on the estates of the south and south-west, where a mass of landless labourers was out of work for months at a time, could provide little expansion of the home market for domestic manufacture. Large estates and social unrest became synonymous. Outside the latifundist region, most peasant agriculture revolved in a secular and precarious quest for self-sufficiency. ‘Favourable geographic and social conditions for agriculture existed only on the northern and Mediterranean peripheries of the peninsula … [which constituted] less than 10 per cent of the surface of the country.’4
Spain thus entered the twentieth century still a dominantly backward agrarian nation – a nation which had, moreover, lost its colonies and was, to no small degree, itself ‘colonized’ by foreign capital. Development remained uneven and weak. This was reflected in uneven social and cultural development between town and country, between regions, within classes.
The phenomenon, true of all development, was revealed with particular sharpness in the case of Spain. Among the more obvious socio-economic examples drawn from the 1930s was the continuing existence of a few thousand landowners in the south – less than 2 per cent of all owners there – who had over two thirds of the land, while 750,000 labourers eked out a living on near-starvation wages. These southern estates contrasted in turn with the plots of the north-west and elsewhere, which were too small to give a peasant a living. At the cultural level, while between 30 per cent and 50 per cent of the population – no one knew exactly – was illiterate in the 1930s, a handful of poets, novelists and playwrights was leading the country into a literary renaissance. Politically, a highly combative working class, on the one hand, encountered an almost total absence of revolutionary theoreticians, marxist or anarchist, on the other. While the differences between a landless anarcho-syndicalist Andalusian day-labourer and a Catholic, smallholding peasant in Old Castile were obvious, there were less obvious but also great differences between a middle-class left republican in one of the large cities and a provincial petty bourgeois who had become republican to protect his interests; or between the nationalist petty bourgeoisies of the two most advanced regions, Catalonia and the Basque country. Spain was not one country but a number of countries and regions marked by their uneven historical development.5
From the turn of the century, however, there had been a significant advance in industrial development. It was aided by an economic boom during the First World War, in which Spain remained neutral, and the world boom of the 1920s. ‘By 1930 Spain was halfway on the road to capitalist development.’6 A new factor began to make its political presence felt: the proletariat. Between 1910 and 1930, the industrial working class more than doubled to over 2,500,000. (It now represented just over 26 per cent of the working population in place of the 16 per cent it had occupied twenty years earlier. Those engaged in agriculture fell from 66 per cent to 45 per cent in the same period.) At the same time, the industrial bourgeoisie, concentrated especially in Catalonia, attempted to take over and ‘renovate’ the state, using the lever of Catalan nationalism to bring pressure to bear for its ends.
Under these different pressures the political system, forged in 1875 to keep in power an agrarian oligarchy, began to disintegrate. The monarchical ruling class was incapable of finding new political and social forms of incorporating the proletariat (as well as certain, mainly nationalist, sectors of the petty bourgeoisie) into a political system which would legitimize its power and ensure its continued domination: the continuance, in other words, of capitalism without threat of revolution (or nationalist secession).
1917 marked the opening of the crisis. Five months after the February revolution in Russia, a general revolutionary strike was declared by socialists and anarcho-syndicalists. Although it was crushed by the army, the old system could do no more than stagger from one crisis to the next for the following six years. During this period Andalusia was rocked by the ‘Bolshevik Triennium’ – three years of revolutionary anarcho-syndicalist agitation which appeared to threaten the existing social order in the south.
Anarchism, it may be recalled, had been introduced to Spain in 1868 before socialism. (In its origins, and for a number of years thereafter, the Spanish Federation of the First International was anarchist.) Its success in attracting recruits was immediate. From the start, the twin poles of recruitment were Catalonia and Andalusia – respectively the most advanced industrial and one of the most backward agrarian regions. In the rest of western Europe, with the exception of Portugal, anarchism as a mass phenomenon disappeared after the First World War. In Spain it grew.7 In 1911, the anarcho-syndicalist CNT (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo) was created in Barcelona. ‘Emancipation of the workers must be the task of the workers themselves.’ Syndicalism was ‘the struggle between two antagonistic classes’. General strikes must be revolutionary. Eight years later, in 1919 – after bringing Barcelona to a halt for a fortnight with a general strike – the CNT came out openly for libertarian communism: the abolition of private property and the state, and the organization of production by free associations of producers. At this time it claimed 700,000 members, over half of them in Catalonia.
In a dominantly agrarian country, where the middle class enjoys little social weight and the ruling class is suffering a political crisis, even a numerically small proletariat, concentrated in specific nuclei, can play a decisive leadership role. 1917 had demonstrated this in Russia. Lenin saw Spain as a country destined for revolution.
The Spanish ruling class was not unaware of the parallels between its country and Russia. The response to the fear of revolution and the general political crisis was for the army to move decisively for the first time in fifty years. With the king’s approval, General Primo de Rivera took power in 1923.
The fundamental problem being what it was, the general’s social programme, not surprisingly, was based on ‘the suppression of the class struggle’. The CNT was outlawed. The so
cialist-led trade union the UGT (Unión General de Trabajadores), with some 200,000 members, was tolerated, however, and its secretary general, Largo Caballero, collaborated (albeit briefly) with the dictatorship. The original schism between anarchism and socialism was reinforced, maintaining the split in the working class. It was in these circumstances that the FAI (Federación Anarquista Ibérica) was formed in 1927. Its founding aim was to federate the previously scattered anarchist groups in Spain. As an anarchist federation (whose existence as a clandestine organization was not announced for two years) it could have no general ‘political line’. But in Catalonia, especially, in the 1930s it pursued an ultra-leftist and insurrectionist policy.
Buoyed by the boom of the 1920s, the Primo de Rivera dictatorship collapsed with it in 1930, dispatched in large part by the conservative forces it had set out to defend. For the next fifteen months, efforts were made to save the old system with the king at its head.
In the meanwhile, republicans of all shades of opinion met in the summer of 1930 and formed a revolutionary committee with the aim of overthrowing the monarchy. Two members of the PSOE (Partido Socialista Obrero Español) attended the San Sebastián meeting in a personal capacity; and two months later the socialist party executive agreed to participate in a future republican government. The largest working-class political party (the anarchist movement was not a party) prepared to hitch its fate to the petty bourgeois republicans.
In December 1930, a republican uprising failed; but general strikes took place in most major cities with the exception of Barcelona and Madrid where general strikes had occurred a month earlier.8
In the hope of being able to arrange a return to the pre-dictatorship constitution, municipal elections were held in April 1931, to test the wind. The large towns – but not the countryside – voted overwhelmingly for republican candidates. The elections were interpreted as a plebiscite against the monarchy. Two days later on 14 April the king – warned by the civil guard commander, General Sanjurjo, that his forces would not stand behind him – left the country, and the second republic was declared.
*
That evening the crowds gathered in the Puerta del Sol in the heart of Madrid. Among them was a fifteen-year-old secondary school student, Victoria ROMAN, who had come with many of her fellow pupils and teachers to witness the historic moment. Republican flags had appeared as though by magic all over the city; elsewhere the republic had already been declared, often to the strains of the Marseillaise. In the distance she saw the leaders approach the door of the interior ministry. There were Largo Caballero, Azaña, Alcalá Zamora. They went in. She saw the bearded figure of Fernando de los Ríos approach another door and strike it with his walking stick. The door swung open and he went in. Power, it seemed, was there to be taken by a knock on a door.
—‘The republic has arrived without bloodshed,’ one of my teachers said. ‘Yes,’ replied another, ‘without bloodshed – and we shall live to regret it.’ I was shocked to hear him talk like that; but later I came to wonder if he wasn’t right …
In Barcelona similar crowds gathered in the Plaça de Sant Jaume. A new left republican Catalan party, the Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, formed barely a month earlier, had won the elections. Its leader, Francesc Macià, proclaimed the Catalan republic.9 In the square a prominent CNT militant was encouraged to address the crowd. Climbing on to the shoulders of a couple of men, Josep ROBUSTE started to make a speech pointing out that the republic was no more than a word. No one listened to him.
—They were drunk with the idea of the republic. They thought it was a miracle, a panacea for all past problems – not least the dictatorship which had brought brutal repression to Barcelona. I got down. Had I attempted to go on talking I might easily have been physically assaulted …
The popular enthusiasm of the large urban centres was not repeated everywhere in the provinces. For example, at the college run by monks in Salamanca where he was studying, Juan CRESPO recalled that the proclamation of the republic was treated as a day of mourning. The headmaster of the school preached a sermon on the tragedy of the king’s departure.
—He criticized the Spaniards’ ingratitude to the king, praised the monarchy’s service to the nation, recalled the example of the Catholic Kings who had united the nation. By the end he was nearly in tears, and so were we …
*
Public tears of joy mixed with private tears of sadness. Neither adequately measured the size of the task which confronted the new republican regime. This was nothing less than to bring into being what one hundred years of history had unsuccessfully striven to achieve: an advanced bourgeois democratic state. The bourgeoisie having failed (or rather, having failed to attempt) the task, this was now left to the political leadership of what one historian has called ‘a thin but politically very active layer – the lower middle classes of the towns’.10 The greater part of the urban professional classes, intellectuals, school teachers and journalists sympathized with the petty bourgeois republicans. It was the class which had taken the lead in all the revolutions of the past seventy-five years but had never, except for brief revolutionary periods, held power. On the advent of the republic, the liberal republicans were organized in loose political groupings which owed allegiance more to a particular political figure – Manuel Azaña, Alcalá Zamora, Marcelino Domingo – than to a defined ideological or political programme. Such definition was achieved only in April 1934, when the left republican party under Azaña’s leadership was formed.
In essence, the republic’s task was to reform the socio-economic structures of the Spanish state with the dual but complementary objectives of ‘modernizing’ capitalism while preventing proletarian revolution (or nationalist secession). This entailed finding new forms of legitimizing the capitalist system which – thanks to the reforms involved – would serve to incorporate the proletariat (and the nationalist petty bourgeoisie) into the new political system. This the republican-socialist coalition hoped to do by concentrating its major reforms on three sectors: the ‘latifundist aristocracy’, the church and the army. Adding to the already considerable difficulties involved in this task was the fact that the attempt came at a moment of world economic crisis when, internationally, parliamentary democracy appeared on the retreat before fascism. What could be achieved in the circumstances, how much had been done?
From the very start the republican regime had made a crucial mistake, thought Juan ANDRADE. One of the founding members of the Spanish communist party and subsequently a leader of the dissident communist POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista), he felt that the regime had failed to keep the initiative, to take advantage of the popular enthusiasm in order to consolidate itself.
—There is only one way a revolutionary movement, which comes to power through elections, and which is being pushed forward by the masses, can consolidate itself: by taking radical measures immediately. This it failed to do. The bourgeois forces were demoralized, measures to reform the basic structures of the state, the army, the land could have been taken straight away. Failure to do so allowed the bourgeoisie to reorganize, to begin the counter-attack …
While the coalition held political power, economic power escaped it. True, the constituent assembly adopted the classical measures of an advanced bourgeois revolution: separation of church and state, genuine universal suffrage (including women and soldiers), a cabinet responsible to a (single-chamber) parliament, a secular educational system. Significantly absent from the assembly, however, was the revolutionary working class, represented by the CNT, and, almost without exception, the former ruling class, the representatives of capital. The new constitution was unlikely to satisfy either, as a result. This was perhaps less important than the coalition’s failure to achieve the basic reforms outlined above. Its agrarian reform programme frightened the important rural bourgeoisie, but did not in fact take its land – leaving the landless dissatisfied. Its religious policy attacked with unnecessary acerbity an important area of the bourgeoisie’
s ideological dominance – religious education – and made a gift to the reaction of a fertile terrain on which to recruit and regroup its forces. Its military reform allowed many officers to leave the army on full pay but did not fundamentally affect the military hierarchy or the position of monarchist (and later falangist) officers within it. Similarly, the coalition did little to change the old monarchical state apparatus through which it had to govern; and while it respected conservative financial orthodoxy it could do little or nothing to prevent the bourgeoisie exercising its economic power (flight of capital, refusal to invest). It temporarily incorporated half the working class, thanks to socialist collaboration, and effectively placed outside the law the other half, the CNT – which had decided to remain in ‘open war’ against the state and staged three insurrectionary uprisings in under two years. It gave an autonomy statute to Catalonia and failed to do the same for the Basque country. ‘Like so many others before and since’, in Hugh Thomas’s words, it ‘frightened the middle class without satisfying the workers’.11 Finally, after two years in power, it split up in 1933.
The achievement of an advanced bourgeois democracy was, patently, going to have to be carried through without the bourgeoisie, if it were to be carried through at all. There was nothing unusual about this, perhaps. More unusual was that, seemingly, it would have to be carried through against the bourgeoisie.
The reaction did not take long to reorganize. Recovered from the shock of the monarchy’s fall, reorganized in hostility to the coalition’s ‘anti-clerical and separatist’ legislation, the right began its counter-attack. A wave of church burnings, which spread from Madrid to the south barely a month after the republic’s proclamation, mobilized a large part of Catholic opinion. Less than a year later, however, an ill-supported army-monarchist uprising showed that ‘extra-parliamentary’ solutions were not yet the order of the day.
Blood of Spain Page 2
