—In those first weeks you heard people in queues saying – or even shouting in the streets – ‘We’ve just come back from the Manzanares – there are seventeen today,’ remembered Alvaro DELGADO, son of a shop manager who lived in the working-class district of Lavapies. Men, women and even children went to see the corpses; it was a spectacle. ‘There was one today who was wearing silk stockings, I lifted up her petticoats and she had beautiful underwear on –’ That was one of the many remarks I overheard …
Among others, the communist party took action. Pedro SUAREZ, the communist clerk who had set out with his wife in a Madrid double-decker bus to fight at the Alto del León pass, was back in Madrid to see his wife who had been wounded after a couple of days at the front. Because of the assassinations he was ordered by his party to remain in Madrid. The rearguard was abandoned and all sorts of crimes were being committed, he was told. He and others were to serve in an auxiliary force at the orders of the DGS to try to stop them. They set up street controls. When a car was stopped, the occupants were asked for their identity papers.
—Then one of us would say, ‘Anyone who does not wish to be in this car should say so now and get out.’ This was in case someone was being taken for a paseo. It happened once, that I remember; when we disarmed and checked on the occupants, it turned out they were common criminals. Within three months we had put an end to the paseos. We couldn’t stop the occasional assassination, it’s true, but searches could now only be carried out by the police, who had to have a special Security HQ warrant – a white one by day, a red one at night – and a neighbour or the porter had to be present during the search and sign a statement of what had been found …
A non-political public prosecutor who was appointed to a Popular Tribunal and whose task it was not only to present the case against the accused but to act as ‘defender of the law’, found that there was rarely a miscarriage of justice if the jury had the law explained to them.
—It was when the law wasn’t explained – which happened frequently because the judges were untrained or were right-wingers – that all sorts of outrage were committed …
There were, in fact, two sorts of tribunal. The first, in Fernando MORENO’s view, was a perfectly constitutional creation set up to try people on charges of rebellion, sedition and other crimes against state security. The seven Popular Front parties and organizations each appointed two jurors and the tribunal was presided over by a professional judge assisted by two other judges. The jury’s task was simply to find for or against the accused. The three judges were responsible for sentencing.
Created at the same time, and much less known, were the emergency tribunals (Tribunal de Urgencia). These, MORENO believed, were ‘unconstitutional, illegal and flagrantly political’: they could try people accused of ‘disaffection to the republic’; could find people guilty retroactively – ‘to have voted monarchist, or for the CEDA was sufficient cause to be sentenced’. The emergency courts could not hand down sentences of more than five years’ imprisonment, while the Popular Tribunals could sentence to death. There was no appeal from either tribunal.
—The major problem was the lack of reliable judges and investigating magistrates. The judicial corps had been virtually dismantled after the uprising, judges had been arrested, assassinated, had fled. But not all the right-wingers had been removed. Because they were frightened for their lives, they acted either extremely harshly in order to prove their loyalty or else were so timid they refused to stick their necks out. On one occasion, I said to a fellow prosecutor: ‘we must act impartially, see that justice is done.’ ‘No, we’ll act as harshly as we can and may he who falls fall –’ That was the attitude of many right-wingers; it was a negation of justice …
Mario REY, falangist carpenter, who had been in the Montaña barracks and had managed to walk out through the crowds when they stormed it, was tried by an emergency tribunal (which in common parlance was also called a Popular Tribunal). After his escape from the Montaña, he had at first remained hidden in a friend’s house. When he attempted to return home – his parents believed he had been assassinated – he was arrested in the street by the self-styled ‘brigade of criminal investigation’, led by García Atadell, a man of sad reputation, who was soon to defect with a considerable quantity of loot, be captured and executed in Seville by the insurgents. Released after a couple of days, REY was re-arrested for having no identification papers.
Worse than prison and awaiting trial, had been the hiding, he thought. School-mates, lifelong friends from his barrio, went to his home looking for him.
—Friends I’d played football with, got up to schoolboy escapades with, played truant with only a few years before, now wanted to kill me. How do you explain it? From one day to the next I had become a wild beast to be tracked down and killed. ¡Coño! That was what was so brutal, so absurd, about a civil war …
By contrast, he was not maltreated under arrest or in prison.32 At his trial, he was accused of being a falangist. He defended himself – the man who was appointed to defend him not opening his mouth – maintaining that the Falange had been a perfectly legal organization before the war and that as a teenager he was too young to have any real political understanding.
—The trial lasted about twenty minutes. They acquitted me. As far as I know, I was the only falangist ever acquitted by a Popular Tribunal. They didn’t know, of course, that I had been in the Montaña barracks …
In due course, he was released from Porlier prison. As he came out of the prison gates, a policeman stepped forward.
—‘You – get up in there.’ He pointed at the lorry and I climbed into it; there were others already there. I don’t know whether they had been sentenced or not. We were taken off to a concentration camp where, with 500 or 600 others, we were kept for the next two years until the war ended …
* * *
All dictatorship is odious, all violence repugnant; yet, despite our pacifist sentiments, we revolutionaries have almost always had to resort to them to impose our ideas … A revolution carried out by the syndicalist organization’s resolute intervention … can only have as its instrument of violence the dictatorship of the people in arms which refuses the establishment of any type of government.
Eleuterio Quintanilla, Asturian libertarìan leader, speech to the national congress of the CNT during the debate on the Russian revolution (Madrid 1919)
* * *
BARCELONA
Over everything, still, there hung a pall of ambiguity. The Catalan anarcho-syndicalists had ‘put off’ libertarian revolution; and yet, daily, the revolution in Barcelona was taking root in CNT collectives and union-run industries. Hostile to ‘power’, the libertarian leaders had refused to take power, when in fact the CNT was the only power in Barcelona. They had opted to ‘collaborate’ in the anti-fascist militia committee which they proceeded to dominate while refusing to make the committee the real instrument of their power.33
Power, like nature, abhors a vacuum. Even more so in the crucible of a civil war which is the politics of class struggle raised to the extreme of armed conflict. The means of production were largely in the hands of the Catalan working class, but political power was atomized in myriad committees; shared, though unequally, in Barcelona between the anti-fascist militia committee and the Generalitat; divided within the committee itself; divided again between it and other committees in Catalonia; divided between Catalonia and Madrid. Such dual (if not multiple) power, normal to an incomplete revolution, could not remain static.
—The CNT–FAI took power de facto without recognizing or taking responsibility for it. They should have taken power politically, as they had taken it in the streets, in the view of Sebastià CLARA, a CNT civil servant and one of the thirty signatories of the famous treintista manifesto which had split the CNT five years before. They should have taken over the Generalitat, changed its name to council or committee if they couldn’t accept the word government, and ensured themselves the majority representation. If
there were political crises they would have precipitated them, they would have proposed the solutions. The masses were looking for that sort of leadership, which only a government could provide …
In their revolutionary surge to take over the means of production – the objective of the anarcho-syndicalist revolution and the basis of libertarian communism34 – the Catalan libertarians had overlooked one very ‘material’ element of power: finance. The Generalitat never lost control of Catalonia’s banking and financial institutions, which were under the control of the UGT bank employees’ union. From the start, the Generalitat appointed delegates in each bank, with the union’s agreement, to control operations and prevent the flight of capital. The union carried out to the letter all the instructions issued by the Generalitat finance councillor and the central government, Joan GRIJALBO, a prominent union member, recollected.
—We had no plans to socialize or collectivize the banks: collectivization of individual banks is incompatible with running a banking system. There was some talk, at the start, of the UGT nationalizing the banks; but this was shelved when the Generalitat opposed it, and we realized it was impossible to haggle with the only authority capable of running the banking system …
Moreover, as he was well aware, the Catalan banking system was relatively weak at the time; the major banks in Catalonia were not Catalan but Spanish. To have nationalized them would have meant nationalizing banks throughout the Popular Front zone.
The Catalan libertarians’ ‘oversight’ was perhaps less important than was often supposed. Pre-war Catalonia had never been able to ‘cash in’ its industrial weight for the political direction of the Spanish state; the bourgeoisie lacked one requisite for it: banking and finance capital. Now, for much the same reason, the Catalan revolution could not ‘cash in’ its specific weight; it did not control the country’s financial resources; Madrid did.35 Nevertheless the ‘oversight’ reveals something of the ambiguity of the libertarian revolution; for banking and gold are to capitalism what organized coercion – the police, judiciary, army – is to the state: the ultimate power. The republic had temporarily lost the use of the second, but retained the first. The libertarian revolution had gained neither.
From his position on the militia committee, Jaume MIRAVITLLES, the Esquerra politician, was growing pessimistic. Things, in his view, were chaotic. If they continued like this he – ‘and the other representatives of the petty bourgeoisie, that’s to say, of a class which could not take the helm of the revolution’ – feared it meant losing the war. Dali wrote him from Paris: he wanted to set up a department in Barcelona, which he would head, to be called ‘The Irrational Organization of Daily Life’. An historic project.
—‘Salvador,’ I wrote back, ‘we don’t need you, it’s perfectly organized as it is.’ There are historical moments when the slogan ‘Freedom’ is the correct one to mobilize people – as was the case to bring in the republic. But there are others when the slogan ‘Order – Revolutionary Order’ corresponds to the objective needs of the situation. And this slogan was being put out by the communist party; we could see the communists beginning to gain strength. The fact that power was slipping into their hands was perfectly understandable. But we couldn’t get the CNT to understand it …
The dilemma was not the ‘everything or nothing’, ‘CNT dictatorship or collaboration’ which the libertarian leaders had formulated. It was a political problem of power. Collaboration was a pre-condition of working-class power. Only two months earlier, the CNT Saragossa congress had called for a revolutionary working-class alliance; now was the time to implement it. (In the changed circumstances, such an alliance would almost certainly have to include a minority representation of the petty bourgeoisie, but the CNT would have the dominant voice).36 The decision was not taken until it was too late. The anarchists did not believe in taking power but in destroying it. Their refusal to take it nearly led to their own destruction.
*
On 19 July, the unified socialist party of Catalonia, PSUC, did not exist; the fusion of four small parties, including the socialist union of Catalonia and the communist party of Catalonia, was planned before the uprising, and precipitated by it. The PSUC began with some 6,000 members, about 2,500 in Barcelona.37 The new party, which controlled the UGT, affiliated immediately to the Comintern: to all intents and purposes it was thus the Communist party of Catalonia.
Both PSUC and UGT grew tremendously. It was the same phenomenon as in the rest of the Popular Front zone: affiliations en masse, the determination – through weight of numbers, irrespective of ‘quality’ – to impose one organization’s domination over the other. The phenomenon was made more acute in Catalonia by the obligation (imposed by the CNT) to join one or the other of the two main unions. Almost all the treintista unions rejoined the CNT; so too did a multitude of individuals in search of the protection of a trade union card. Fear of the CNT drove other unions, including the POUM’s, into the UGT; fear of the revolution drove the mass of the petty bourgeoisie in the same direction. By November, the UGT’s membership in Catalonia – which four months earlier had been barely one tenth that of the CNT’s – actually slightly outnumbered the anarcho-syndicalists. This was an unbelievable situation compared to the past and was a reminder of the numerical importance of the petty bourgeoisie. The PSUC’s strength, meanwhile, rose nearly tenfold to 50,000. This mass invasion of the socialist trade union by shop-keepers, office workers, employees who had lost faith in their traditional parties like the Esquerra – as well as the width of the PSUC’s beckoning doors – aroused the libertarians’ scandalized anger at what they conceived as a patently ‘counter-revolutionary’ move.38
Pere ARDIACA, a communist from before the fusion who became the editor of the PSUC’s paper Treball, was in no doubt about what the situation required: a government which could govern.
—A revolutionary order had to be imposed on the rearguard. The militia committee was never, and never proposed becoming, the government. We wanted a Popular Front government in which all anti-fascist forces would be represented …
Keeping the anti-fascist sectors of the bourgeoisie on the side of the struggle was essential to victory, the PSUC asserted; such a strategy was not an obstacle to securing the proletariat’s hegemony and furthering the revolution; on the contrary.
—We believed that all measures taken to win the war would strengthen, not weaken, this hegemony – especially as expressed in the union between the UGT and CNT – so that after victory the revolution would be consolidated.
For the revolution had not been made here. It’s one thing to take over the means of production and another to ensure that the bases of the revolution are consolidated, that, ideologically, it has the people with it. Everything had been overturned; but that in itself guaranteed nothing, because the bourgeoisie could very well have returned to power. Everything depended on who won hegemony while the war was being pursued to a victorious conclusion. To do this required a certain order.
We were criticized by the CNT and POUM as being counter-revolutionary for organizing the petty bourgeoisie in a union, the GEPCI (Gremios y Entidades de Pequeños Comerciantes e Industrials), which we created to defend their interests. We believed that this social class, which could considerably help the country’s economy until such time as the conditions for a socialist economy had been created and it would disappear as a class, had to be preserved. It was not a counter-revolutionary move, it brought forces into the ranks to help the revolution …
Not surprisingly, Juan ANDRADE, of the POUM executive committee, saw the situation somewhat differently. The PSUC looked for support to the petty bourgeoisie (which the POUM, like the CNT, failed to take account of) because it lacked any specific weight amongst the working class.
—But I don’t believe this alone was the major cause of the PSUC’s growth. The CNT was the reason. The latter terrorized so many people that, in reaction, they came to consider the communists as the party of order …
But th
e PSUC was not yet strong enough to confront the CNT head-on. Despite the former’s growth, the libertarians were still the masters of Barcelona.
—The CNT had real power but it didn’t know what to do with it; it had great revolutionary will, but lacked revolutionary consistency, thought ARDIACA. Even if it had taken power it lacked a programme which would have won the support of the majority of the Catalan people. Meanwhile, it continued to act much of the time as though it had taken power (without actually saying so) while at the same time apparently sharing that power with the petty bourgeois Catalan parties and us. It was a dual power situation without doubt – but dual power between one part of the proletariat and another, not between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. That was why the situation became such an obstacle, why it had to be resolved …
Juan ANDRADE was dismayed on his arrival from Madrid to join the POUM’s executive that the question of power was being posed neither by the CNT nor by his own party when, between them, they ‘represented the real working-class strength in Catalonia’. He drew up a manifesto calling for a Constituent Assembly of Workers, Peasants, Policemen and Soldiers, which met considerable opposition from within his party executive, whose programme at that moment was one solely of increasing wages and improving working conditions. Finally, it was approved and the manifesto appeared on posters and leaflets throughout Barcelona.
—It was a call for the creation of a Soviet, of course. But you couldn’t use that word, for the anarchists would immediately have labelled it authoritarian communism. In truth, the anarchists didn’t know what they wanted. They had always called for revolution, said the revolution must be made, but never thought about what would happen when it had been. They went from concession to concession …
Viewing the Catalan situation from the distance of Asturias, where the CNT adopted an entirely different posture,39 Ignacio IGLESIAS, also of the POUM, reflected that the Catalan CNT suffered from a ‘superiority complex’.
Blood of Spain Page 25
