—Having proven its strength in the streets, it believed it could do whatever it wanted, including humouring its political opponents. It didn’t realize that the boot was on the other foot. Without political power it would not, in the last analysis, command either power in the factories or power in the streets. Because it didn’t suffer from such a complex, the CNT in Madrid and Asturias acted with a much greater awareness of the political realities …
But the CNT militants, who had taken over factories and businesses in Barcelona, retained their trust in their organization, which, ‘strong as a lion’, incarnated their revolutionary aspirations and traditions: the libertarian transformation of society which would be realized by the proletariat’s administration of the economy and the abolition of the state. The POUM leaflets and posters blew away, grew tattered in the wind. The CNT would determine its own decisions.40 At the end of August, it did so. Again García Oliver cried: ‘Either we collaborate or we impose our dictatorship. Choose!’ Again the majority opted for ‘collaboration’ – but with a difference; this time it was to accept the invitation, repeatedly made by President Companys, to participate in the Generalitat government.
—The president hoped that if the CNT would join a government, the very stones of the Generalitat, the historic atmosphere, the seats, portraits, his presidency would contribute to structuring the amorphous explosion that had taken place, in the belief of MIRAVITLLES, who, like his party leader, Companys, thought that only a political solution of this nature could restore the situation …
No one, not even the CNT, doubted that some form of organization was necessary to fuse the disparate powers that existed. An Economics Council, semi-dependent on the Generalitat, and with CNT participation, had been set up in mid-August to structure and rationalize the revolutionary Catalan economy. But more was evidently needed. The choice was between working-class and Popular Front power; there were no alternatives.
The decision in favour of the latter was reached at a secret meeting and was taken – in accord with libertarian ideology – by the Catalan libertarians alone; only they could decide a matter which affected their region – though its impact were national. The decision was kept secret. A few days later, in Madrid, Largo Caballero, the left-wing socialist leader, formed the first Popular Front government. This the CNT was not yet ready to join. Instead, it proposed for Madrid what it had failed to propose for Catalonia – a working-class government (called a National Defence Council to avoid the word ‘government’) with republican participation.41 In what was to become a persistent pattern, the CNT reacted to – rather than acted on – political events. In the event its reaction came too late; a new Madrid government already existed.
Until then, for the previous six weeks, the petty bourgeois republicans had governed alone in Madrid. The government’s sway had extended little beyond the capital, and even in the capital its power was tenuous, requiring the constant approval of the Popular Front committee.42 It was becoming rapidly apparent that this ‘dual power’ situation, in which real power was scattered in fragmented local parcels, was detrimental both to the war and the revolution. The failure of the myriad committees to fuse into a revolutionary power that would overthrow the remains of the bourgeois state and mobilize the total energies of the population for the revolutionary task of winning the war had to – if the latter was not to be rapidly lost – lead to the restoration of an alternative power.43 The latter, to be effective, had to include the working-class forces and ‘bring under control’ the fragmented and fragmentary revolution that had taken place, centralize and control the militias, organize and plan a coherent war effort. The real nature of this new power was immediately apparent to Juan ANDRADE in Barcelona, who greeted the formation of Largo Caballero’s Popular Front government of socialists, communists (the first time a communist party had joined such a government in western Europe) and republicans, as ‘the government of the counter-revolution’. (For this he was banned by the POUM executive from writing editorials in the party’s paper, La Batalla.)
The establishment of this new government, whose creation respected established republican legal norms, represented the option – in the complicated initial moments of Non-Intervention – of trying to secure the aid of the bourgeois democracies in return for holding back the full development of the proletarian revolution. Very soon, Largo Caballero, who, as leader of the left socialists, had been insistently calling for revolution in the months preceding the war, was saying: ‘First we must win the war and afterwards we can talk of revolution.’
The CNT initiative to form a working-class central government was hindered, in the eyes of Eduardo de GUZMAN, a CNT journalist in Madrid, by the libertarians’ failure to take power in Barcelona. Important leverage, a revolutionary moment of great promise, was lost, in his view. Even if the total libertarian revolution were impossible at that moment, the revolution could have been pushed forward to the stage of a ‘proletarian government, total working-class democracy in which all sectors of the proletariat – but of the proletariat alone – would be represented’.
—To make a revolution, power must be seized. If the CNT had done so in Catalonia, it would have helped, not hindered our minority position in Madrid. But they believed it was sufficient to have taken the streets, to have seized arms. They completely overlooked the importance of the state apparatus which, with or without arms, retains a very great weight. This error was due in part to the CNT’s insufficient politicization; to be a-political does not mean that one lacks political sense; it means simply that one does not participate in the farce of elections. Politics exist; and revolutionary politics even more …
While heated discussions continued in Madrid, the Catalan CNT sprang its surprise: three CNT councillors (ministers) were joining the new Generalitat government. The militia committee was to be dissolved, and along with it all the local committees which were to be replaced by new town councils. The inevitable next step was decided three weeks later, in mid-October, and announced at the beginning of November: four CNT ministers were entering the central government. The Popular Front option had triumphed.44
The question of power had seemingly been resolved; in reality, the struggle was just beginning.
In the new Generalitat council – the name changed from government to satisfy the libertarians – formed on 27 September, Joan DOMENECH, CNT glassworker, became supplies councillor. Sitting with him were two other libertarians, five republicans, two PSUC representatives and one POUM member.
DOMENECH did not attend the libertarian meeting which decided on joining the Generalitat – he feared that his presence as head of the supplies committee could appear as a form of coercion, since he could expect to be appointed to the same post in the new government. But he believed the decision to join was the correct one. History was made when the opportunity arose, he thought, not by trying to force history. The war made the decision inevitable; the CNT couldn’t allow itself to be trampled on by the political parties, it had to join the government. Not that the CNT militants were prepared for governmental tasks.
—How could we be? Our revolution had always been conceived of as abolishing all governments. Now all of us had to learn. We CNT ministers didn’t have a ‘line’ like the communists. As long as we had no great problems, the CNT imagined that each of us was doing his job; the organization didn’t discuss our work. Only if there were a serious problem – and it hardly ever got to that – would there be a meeting of militants to discuss the organization’s position …
Of course, the CNT would have been a lot stronger if it had had a defined line. But, he thought, it would not have been the CNT in that case. The CNT was like that – you loved it with all its defects or you left it. There could be no such thing as ‘party discipline’ because when you joined the CNT as a worker, no one asked what you believed or thought. A carpenter joined the woodworkers’ union, a barber the barbers’ union, and that was all there was to it.
—Certain FAI groups – not the FAI
as a whole – tried to impose that sort of tyranny on the CNT; but each time they did, the base reacted: ‘This far and no further,’ they said. ‘If you don’t like it come and kill us – but in the streets, not here in the CNT itself.’ …
DOMENECH’s appointment was to be expected; but the manner of the other two CNT councillors’ appointment reflected the organization’s spontaneity. One, who had been a member of the CNT only briefly some twenty years ago and subsequently had been a member of the FAI (which refused, as such, to take part in the government), happened to be passing by when the names were being chosen and was offered the post. The other, Joan Fàbregas, had joined the CNT only after 19 July; in earlier times, he had been closely connected with the business world and the right-wing Lliga. But his financial and economic expertise were to play an important role in defining a legal status for the industrial collectives.
* * *
LAW
First Section
General Provisions
ARTICLE 1 In accordance with the constitution of the republic and the present Statute, Alava, Guipúzcoa and Vizcaya constitute an autonomous region within the Spanish State, taking the name of ‘Basque country’ …
(Madrid, 4 October 1936)
* * *
23. See p. 65.
24. ‘I doubt if those village people hated us of the right as much as the Spanish Catholic clergy and we, its faithful servants, hated them.’ The testimony of a requeté who executed left-wingers in Lora del Río, a township of 11,000, where some 300 – including at least one pregnant woman – were estimated to have been shot (see ‘El comienzo: la “liberación” de Lora del Río (1936)’, Cuadernos de Ruedo Ibérico, 46–8, Paris, 1975). According to the insurgents, 138 people were assassinated in Lora before it was taken (see Preliminary Report on Atrocities by Communist forces in Southern Spain, 1936–37, London, 1937). In El Arahal, a township of 12,000 with a long anarchist tradition near Seville, twenty-three right-wingers were burned alive in the jail shortly before the place was taken by the insurgents. In return, legionaries ‘inflicted an exemplary punishment’, the Correo de Andalucia of Seville reported on 25 July 1936, killing some ‘seventy to eighty people between defenders, the executed and those who attempted to flee’.
25. Because of his world reputation as one of Spain’s leading poets and playwrights, García Lorca’s assassination in Granada has come to symbolize the barbarity of the insurgent repression. In his native city, with a population of about 125,000, 2,137 men and women are recorded as having been executed in the city cemetery – ‘the flower of Granada’s intellectuals, lawyers, doctors … along with huge numbers of ordinary left-wing supporters’. (I. Gibson, The Death of Lorca, London, 1973.) Many more, including Lorca himself, were executed beyond the confines of the city itself.
26. See below, pp. 205–9.
27. See Militancies 2, pp. 86–9. There was a belief, common to both sides, and not infrequently proven in practice, that personal courage could prevent an assassin from committing a crime. ‘A courageous man can make a coward – for that is, essentially, what an assassin is – ashamed of himself and withdraw; for the courageous man says, “You will have to shoot me first if you want to carry out your dirty work.” And that makes the other think of the consequences of his act, of his cowardice.’ (Jesús ALVAREZ, chemist, Valladolid.) In Old Castile the inquirer will hear instances of village priests who, by a display of great personal courage, prevented their parishioners’ execution. For an example, see Militancies 5, pp. 172–3.
28. The question of the number of victims caused by the repression on both sides still awaits a definitive historical answer. Oral history – except at the village level – does not provide accurate answers; in the large towns, because of their size, only documentary records (such as those provided by Ian Gibson in his Death of Lorca for the insurgent executions in Granada cemetery) will finally elucidate – if such is possible – what has been the subject of a series of unsatisfactory estimates from a variety of positions over the years. Overall, it can be safely supposed, the Franquista repression caused by far the greater number of victims, for the simple reason that it was more extensive in time, space and breadth. In space, it came to exercise its reign over the whole of Spain, capturing new territories and new, often largely hostile populations, throughout the war, while the republican territory receded. In time, because it continued fully operative for four years after the war ended. In breadth, because the class enemy–the industrial and rural proletariat (to name but that class) – was anything up to three times as numerous as the whole of the bourgeoisie. (If for no other reason than that they have a larger class to dominate, victorious bourgeois counter-revolutions have historically proven more bloody than revolutions.) The difference in attitudes was in itself indicative. The republican government (along with all parties and trade unions) condemned assassinations and, as its power increased, brought them under control. Although the insurgent nationalist authorities also ended random assassinations, no official condemnation was ever pronounced in the zone they controlled. The republic introduced Popular Tribunals which, despite defects, established trial by jury under the existing civilian legal code (see below, pp. 176, 177–8). The nationalist summary mass court-martials were little more than a device to ‘legitimize’ the repression. (As readers of the Diario de Burgos, which reported one such court-martial in Valladolid gaol which began in the morning of 2 September 1936, and was over by 3 p.m., may have reflected. In that time, the paper said, 448 prisoners accused of military rebellion – the usual charge against those who had resisted the military – were tried. Allowing for a misprint, it was a fairly average time for forty-four or forty-eight prisoners to be tried.) Some political parties in the republican zone operated parallel police forces and checas (interrogation/detention centres – named after the first Bolshevik security organization) which took justice into their own hands; after the initial moments this did not happen in the insurgent zone where the repression was rigorously, methodically organized and where a large part of the terror – perhaps the most cruel – was to keep prisoners under sentence of death for months, if not longer, never sure whether or not they would be shot tomorrow.
29. See p. 116.
30. In the first weeks of the war, the republicans used their air superiority, such as an obsolete air force could provide, to bomb insurgent-held towns (Córdoba, Granada, Segovia, Valladolid, to name only these), causing civilian casualties on a scale reminiscent of First World War raids. The insurgent air raids on Madrid, using German bombers, would soon escalate to a level heralding the beginning of the Second World War.
31. By insisting on the execution of those sentenced to death after the October 1934 insurrection in Asturias and Catalonia and withdrawing his support – along with the CEDA – when the centre-right government refused to carry out the sentences.
32. He was still there in November 1936 when the newly appointed anarchist head of Madrid prisons, Melchor Rodríguez, sent a delegate to Porlier gaol to inform the prisoners personally that nobody would be taken from the prison at night to be shot illegally. ‘From that moment on, the arbitrary executions ended.’
On the other side of the lines, in Salamanca, General Millán Astray, founder of the Foreign Legion, visited the gaol on 1 January 1937 on behalf of Franco to give a similar assurance to the prisoners: no one would in future be taken from the gaol without trial and shot. (Evidence of a republican doctor who was imprisoned in Salamanca, then Franco’s HQ.)
33. An index of that power – which simple verbal threats sufficed to enforce – was the undoing of the already cited plan to bring guardia civil forces into Barcelona (see p. 142); and soon afterwards, obliging the communist PSUC to leave the government Companys had just formed (31 July 1936), and which at this moment was virtually powerless.
34. Points of Rupture, D, examines this problematic, as well as the treintista split.
35. A Catalan commission which sought credits from Madrid was turned down by
Caballero’s new Popular Front government; so, too, was a request to transfer some of the Spanish gold reserves – the fourth highest in the world – to Catalonia. The refusals, said the CNT economics council delegate Joan Fàbregas, came because the government ‘is not sympathetic to the practical works being realized in Catalonia’ (J. Peirats, La CNT en la revolución española, Paris, 1971, vol. 1, p. 205). Certain libertarian elements then planned to ‘expropriate’ part of the gold held in Madrid, and mobilized 3,000 men for the task; the plan was turned down by the CNT national committee (see D. Abad de Santillán, Por qué perdimos la guerra, Buenos Aires, 1940; Madrid, 1975).
36. Patently, the revolution could not be taken to its ultimate, libertarian communist consequences – not if that revolution required the unanimity of the nation’s masses freely and spontaneously declaring for it. But by ensuring itself the leadership of the proletarian revolution in progress in Catalonia, the libertarian movement would be in a strong position to determine future events, and not only in Catalonia. This required the forging of new instruments of power, of which the militia committee was an embryo. The libertarians’ view that the CNT was itself such a power – the trade union having the task of organizing the revolutionary economy – militated against the creation of any new proletarian organs of power.
37. Though somewhat smaller than the dissident communist POUM at the outbreak of the war, the constituent parties of the PSUC had enjoyed a greater political bargaining power, securing the nomination (and subsequent election) of seven members of the victorious Popular Front lists throughout Catalonia in February 1936. The POUM had only one. For the PSUC’s and UGT’s subsequent rapid growth, see J. Bricall, Política económica de la Generalitat (Barcelona, 1970), pp. 120 and 315; Balcells, Cataluña contemporánea, II (1900–1936), p. 43.
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