Blood of Spain

by Ronald Fraser

  —It was our idea in the CNT that everything should start from the worker, not – as with the communists – that everything should be run by the state. To this end we wanted to set up industrial federations – textiles, engineering, department stores, etc. – which would be represented on an overall Economics Council which would direct the economy. Everything, including economic planning, would thus remain in the hands of the workers.19

  An attempt was made to federate the department stores; it failed. The works councils opposed it, considering the enterprises as their own and being unwilling to join a federation.

  —It was understandable. Only a few months before, the traditional relationship between employer and worker had been overthrown. Now the workers were being asked to make a new leap – to the concept of collective ownership. It was asking a lot to expect the latter to happen overnight …

  Other problems, directly related to the stores, were raised in the general assemblies: they included sex discrimination – female assistants who complained of the Don Juan attitudes of their male counterparts. ‘In the revolutionary fervour of the time, the latter was a subject the women took very seriously.’

  Profits were not a problem – there were none, at least up to mid-1937 when FERRER joined the army. Any surplus there might have been was ploughed back into the stores; wages were raised, working conditions improved and other improvements made. This in itself was a success: the important thing, in his view, was that the stores continued to operate throughout the war.

  In the smaller enterprises, those of between fifty and 100 employees, where collectivization was voluntary, one question that almost invariably arose was the role of the former owner. As a member of the trade union council attached to the Economics Council, FERRER attended many assemblies called by the workers to discuss collectivizing their enterprise which he, in a speech, would encourage them to do.

  —Very often the owner would also address the assembly, practically bringing tears to everyone’s eyes with the story of the sacrifices he had made to build up the firm – only now to see it threatened with collectivization. In these cases, I always suggested to the assembly that he be made the managing director, since the works council had to appoint one anyway. My idea was that the former owner was the most suitable person because, with his capitalist egoism, he would watch over the enterprise and make sure everything functioned as well as possible; he no doubt would one day be hoping to regain possession. My proposal was almost always accepted …

  These former owners undoubtedly opposed any attempt to amalgamate their firms with others in order to rationalize their industry, since this went against their individual interests; but at the same time not all former owners were opposed to collectivization of their firms. Because of economic difficulties, many smaller companies could not continue to operate with the same number of employees on higher wages: collectivization was the only answer because the workers then ‘had no other recourse but to keep their wages within the necessary limits’.20

  Profit was not a matter in much evidence in most of the collectives, if for no other reason, in Eduardo PONS PRADES’s experience of the woodworkers’ union, than that ‘no one would have thought it right if the union had acted simply like a capitalist enterprise’.

  —The concept that prevailed was that the working class should have good furniture at cheap prices. Profit and loss was a secondary consideration, and I don’t think that sales prices were studied very seriously in relation to unit costs. It was as though the revolution was all that mattered …

  Unlike the Barcelona textile industry or the department stores, where each collective was an autonomous unit, the woodworkers’ union had socialized its industry, taking over and managing everything from the felling of the lumber in the Vall d’Aran to the furniture retail shops. The union had nearly split over its policy, one section, dominated by the FAI, maintaining that anarchist self-management meant that the workers should set up and operate autonomous centres of production so as to avoid the threat of bureaucratization. A carpenter who wanted to join forces with another or a varnisher had the right to set up on his own, in this view. ‘A concept of self-management that pre-dated capitalism, in effect.’ Socialization won the day: the union ran everything.

  It set up two big workshops, each employing up to 200 men, where those who had been working in small shops, which made up 75 per cent of all carpenters’ shops in Barcelona, were found jobs. A union delegate would go round the small shops, point out to the workers that the conditions were unhealthy and dangerous, that the revolution was changing all this, and secure their agreement to close down and move to the union-built Double X and the 33 EU. The latter had existed before the war, but the union built two more floors for the finishing sections; it produced furniture, mainly tables and side-boards, and the union imported a great amount of French machinery for it. To get the foreign currency out of the Generalitat required considerable union intervention. PONS PRADES remembered the union leader, Hernández, storming out to the Economics Council, saying that if no currency were available there would be no more war work by the union. The latter now occupied about one third of the workforce, PONS PRADES estimated, and was employed making hangars for the air force, huts for the army, pontoon equipment, coachwork for lorries, etc.

  In the retail furniture shops, usually also very small and as often as not run by the owner, his wife and an assistant, a union delegate was appointed. Very often the former owner was made sales delegate of another small shop, the same happening with the owners of the small workshops who became foremen in a larger shop when their places were closed.

  —In fact one of my major surprises was to see how many of the newly appointed administrative heads of union sections were former owners or their sons, PONS PRADES observed. By then, the union had lost at least half of its best militants, between those killed in the streets of Barcelona and those – the greater number – who went to the Aragon front. Added to that, as soon as the call-up was made official, the industry lost all workers between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-two. The union’s success not only in rationalizing and coordinating a whole industry, but in keeping it running throughout the war, in times of great economic difficulties, was in consequence all the more remarkable …

  Inevitably, there were failures, most of which, in this view, could be ascribed to the militants’ lack of preparation. It was ‘the big dream – and each had his own idea of what should be done – but too many were not sufficiently capable of putting it into practice’.

  The major failure, in his and other members’ view (and which supported the original anarchist objection), was that the union became like a large firm. Its structure grew increasingly rigid. ‘From outside it began to look like an American or German trust.’ From within, while the workers had the possibility of expressing their criticisms and needs, it was difficult to secure any changes they wanted.

  —They felt they weren’t particularly involved in decision-making. If the ‘general staff’ decided that production in two workshops should be switched, the workers weren’t informed of the reasons. Lack of information – which could easily have been remedied by producing a news-sheet, for example – bred discontent, especially as the CNT tradition was to discuss and examine everything. Fortnightly delegates’ meetings became monthly and ended up, I think, being quarterly …

  Despite these objections, the first Annual General Assembly renewed almost all the posts unanimously, as he recalled. For, at another level, those who now criticized the union’s efforts had little moral ground for attempting to change everything since most of them had opted out of positions of responsibility from the start, saying that they were content to put in their eight hours a day, and ‘left it to others to do the ungratifying work of creating the new structure. “No, I am not a person to give orders,” was the frequent response. It was a common ideological position among CNT militants that to give orders to someone was self-degrading. But it meant also a loss for the union.’
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  On the other hand, the leadership always had the last word: it was wartime, socialization was working well, it was essential to maintain things as they were.

  —The logic of the times – a logic not very close to the ideology which the majority of CNT members had imbibed. Nevertheless, the unease among union members never led to a strike or even an agreed platform of demands; but I think it would have been difficult to correct the union’s increasingly rigid structure as time went on …

  The union also assumed the role of looking after its members’ physical and moral welfare; it organized an exchange system of its own with an agricultural collective in Valls to supply its cooperative foodshop; it built an Olympic swimming pool, a gymnasium and solarium at its Double X factory; and arranged a form of ‘uniting a man and woman freely and without coercion’ – a form of marriage ceremony to counter the trend of couples who, ‘believing the revolution made everything possible’, began living together and splitting up with too much ease.

  The public entertainments union, like the woodworkers’, socialized its industry, closing down some of the unprofitable neighbourhood ‘flea-pits’ – there were 112 cinemas in the city at the outbreak of the war – and transferred the staff to the Cine Durruti, the brand-new cinema the union built in the Gran Vía (today the Dorado) and the Cine Ascaso (today Vergara) which was already under construction.

  Under an ambitious socialization programme, wages in the cinema industry were to be calculated according to an agreed differential rate depending on job. Sick pay and old-age pensions were established, six weeks’ annual holiday granted, a clinic and a school were to be set up, cinema tickets were to be reduced in price and taxes to be abolished (an item, interestingly, left to the Generalitat to determine and carry out). In the theatre, however, there was to be a single wage rate. ‘As a demonstration of the efforts being made, let it be realized that the greatest of opera singers, like Hipólito Lázaro, and the most humble of workers are going to get the same daily wage.’

  A leading CNT militant, Marcos Alcón, called in his brother-in-law, Juan SAÑA, a fitter by trade who had been working in the famous glass cooperative at Mataró, to help reorganize the film production unit which had been making war documentaries and newsreels. Himself a CNT militant from the age of eighteen, who had seen the inside of thirty-eight gaols, SAÑA made it a condition of joining that feature films should be made. The unit began production of a cinematic version of the play No quiero, No quiero, by Jacinto Benavente, the Nobel prize-winning Spanish playwright. In SAÑA’S eyes, the endeavour was designed to help the war effort; the republic needed foreign currency to buy arms and supplies abroad, and a feature film was a way of securing it.

  —Everything that the republic could show abroad would be bought immediately and at a good price. Everything had to be done to win the war. While the collectives in Catalonia, on the whole, were a success, too many CNT militants put too much time and effort into organizing them when every effort was needed for the war. We should have concentrated all our efforts on winning the war – on the basis of the revolutionary conquests that had already been made – rather than making the revolution …

  The fundamental error, he felt, lay in the failure to do what the enemy had done: overcome all political differences in order to create the type of unity which could win the war. Trying to avoid the ‘scandalous divisions and disputes which wracked the republican zone’, he devoted himself to the production of the only CNT-sponsored feature film of the collectivized entertainment industry. Halfway through, the male lead was arrested for high treason and espionage and was never seen again. On one occasion the entire company was thrown in gaol, while the ‘PSUC, as they began to get the upper hand, made every sort of difficulty for location shooting’; but the film was finished in the end.

  Almost the only problem SAÑA had not had to deal with was the ‘single’ wage introduced in the theatre. It came to a rapid end in dramatic circumstances one day when the famous tenor, Hipólito Lázaro, arrived at the Tivoli theatre where the union was organizing a cycle of operas at popular prices. He was to sing the lead. Before the audience arrived, he got up on stage and addressed the company.

  —‘We’re all equal now,’ he said, ‘and to prove it, we all get the same wage. Fine, since we’re equal, today I am going to collect the tickets at the door and one of you can come up here and sing the lead.’ That did it, of course. There had been several previous protests. That night several of us union leaders met and decided at the very start that we couldn’t leave until we had come up with a worthy solution …

  It didn’t take long. Top actors and singers, like Lázaro and Marcos Redondo, were to be paid 750 pesetas a performance – a 5,000 per cent increase over their previous 15 pesetas a day. Second-and third-category artists received large, but differential increases, while even ushers were given a rise.

  —The single wage didn’t work; the six weeks’ holidays originally agreed on were, obviously, never given. But cinema tickets were reduced in price, tipping was abolished, the theatres were full to overflowing all the time – Azaña used frequently to go to the Liceo to the opera; we were able to clean up or shut down the music halls (where what went on on stage was less important than what was happening in the spectators’ boxes), converting them into variety shows or vaudevilles, where the art lay in the spoken word, doubles entendres. Anyone coming on leave from the front would have thought Barcelona was a constant festival as far as public entertainment was concerned …

  The collectivized entertainments industry was one of the very few to generate a surplus. Greyhound racing was one of the more profitable sides, along with the cinema. José ROBUSTE, a syndicalist party leader, who was president of the greyhound racing section of the entertainments union and a book-keeper at one of the tracks, helped collectivize the industry before leaving for the Aragon front. Everything worked perfectly, he thought. No one was thrown out of work, the old managers, trainers and staff were all kept on. Everyone got paid the same – 15 pesetas a day. Racing was popular, betting continued, the tracks made plenty of money: 100,000 pesetas were loaned to the cinema section which needed money to buy foreign films.

  —Self-management by the workers meant making decisions on buying new dogs and that sort of thing. The dogs had always belonged to the companies which owned the tracks and we took them over. They were our means of production and reproduction: we bred from them. Otherwise things functioned the same. The only change collectivization made was that the product of our labour was now shared out differently from before; the work otherwise went on just the same. In a collectivized factory, the machines are operated by the workers in the same way, clerks carry out the same jobs, technicians do their usual work: there’s no problem at all in passing from a capitalist to a socialist regime …

  The workers’ ‘administration of the economy’ implied, it seemed, taking over from capitalist owners and running enterprises without them. Between the one system and the other was there no rupture? Should the self-managed industries continue in the same mode to produce what the capitalist regime had found profitable to produce? These were questions that the anarcho-syndicalist movement was to be summoned rapidly to answer.21

  In one field, armaments, the answer was ready-given: no such industry existing in Catalonia, everything had to be started from scratch. The machinery for recharging cartridges at the Sant Andreu arsenal had been put out of action when it was stormed by the populace; even the blueprints for the manufacture of shells had disappeared. Thanks to the initiative of a number of CNT metalworkers, in association with a military expert from the Oviedo arms factory, the beginnings of an armaments industry were improvised, and in early August the Generalitat set up a war industries commission. Within a couple of months, it controlled twenty-four major engineering and chemical factories turning out shells, explosives and armoured vehicles amongst other equipment. Pastry-kneading and beer-bottle corking machines were amongst the machinery pressed into service. Machinery for t
wo complete cartridge-producing assemblies was purchased in Belgium; the Belgian government refused export licences and, after further delay, the machinery was bought in France. By October 1937, more than 50,000 workers in 500 factories were directly involved on war production and a further 30,000 on auxiliary war work.22

  La Maquinista, Spain’s leading locomotive works, which the workers had taken over from the start, was declared a war industry by the commission. But it was being run – and had been from the beginning – as a collective. Joan ROIG, the only pre-war manager to remain, had been appointed assistant manager of the enterprise after his close escape at the workers’ hands when he accompanied a company director to the bank to draw the workers’ wages in the first week of the revolution. A liberal Catalan nationalist, he felt he understood the workers’ need for equality, freedom and protection in their work. He was not opposed to collectivization and saw no reason why such an experiment should not succeed.

  None the less, given the factory’s potential, war production there was a disaster, he felt. The workers’ indisputable initiative could not compensate for lack of technical expertise, added to lack of proper management and raw materials.

  —The workers’ committee and later the works council was never able to impose an efficient order of production; the original members, whose first president was a labourer – a great orator in the CNT style – weren’t technically qualified to run the factory, let alone convert it to arms manufacture. Too much was left to luck, too much depended on the individual will of a few people rather than on the combined effort of the whole workforce. The majority of technicians weren’t sympathetic to collectivization. I remember a Generalitat engineer saying that the reason was that none of the technicians had been shot. In a sense he was right. All in all, I don’t think production ever reached 50 per cent of its potential …