Blood of Spain
Page 48
On the Guadarrama front, Antonio IZU, the peasant requeté, told his captain that if he was ordered to wear the falangist blue shirt (which, with the requelés’ red beret, became the uniform of the new movement), he would burn it. In his brother’s company of the America regiment on the Guadalajara front, the men had burnt the blue shirts; and when a requeté subaltern was arrested for leading the opposition to unification, his troops refused to go into the attack.
—They mutinied. An attempt was made to disarm them but they made it clear that they would resist. Only when the alférez was released did they end their action. The Falange never inspired any confidence in me. It was a totalitarian, centralist movement, without respect for the fueros. And the way they carried out the repression during the war – well, they had a different mentality to us …
While unification pleased neither Carlists, falangists nor monarchists, the three movements shared a profound anti-liberal, anti-marxist posture, a concept of ‘organic democracy’9 and a loyalty to the uprising which they had helped precipitate. The major enemy lay on the other side of the lines; and in the trenches, despite occasional friction, unity was an imperative of war.
—We were there to fight a common enemy. When the war was won there would be time enough to settle our differences, thought Alberto PASTOR, farmer and falangist from Valladolid. Unification was a logical continuation of what I had considered necessary when I commanded the Falange militias at the Alto del León in September 1936. Although the Falange command in Valladolid opposed me, I imposed collaboration with requeté units. It was the only way to win the war …
Not that he was blind to what was going on. Remembering that the 1931 republic had declared itself in its constitution a ‘republic of all the workers’, he coined a phrase to describe the nationalist zone. ‘Ours is a national-syndicalist state of all the alféreces provisionales 10 under the command of the military and the clergy.’
But for the ‘utopian’ falangists like RIDRUEJO every day brought another disappointment; they hoped that they might still influence the political situation, but not much else.
—I was coming to realize that the revolution we had hoped to make was impossible. Eighty per cent of those being executed in the rearguard were workers. The repression was aimed at decimating the working class, destroying its power. In eliminating those whom our revolution was to benefit, the purpose of the revolution was itself eliminated. The reasoning behind the necessity for the purge was the sophism (shared moreover by both sides) that the enemy was a minority which was forcing the great mass of those on the other side to fight. Destroy that minority and order would be restored. The repression in the nationalist zone was carried out in cold blood, purposefully and methodically, to destroy that ‘minority’. It was a class war. Not everyone, certainly not the petty bourgeoisie on the nationalist side, recognized it as such, or they would have been on the other side. But the ruling class certainly knew it. Franco was its most lucid exponent; his crusade was but another way of expressing it … 11
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We are motivated exclusively by the desire to defend the democratic republic established on 14 April 1931, and revived last 16 February.
Jesús Hernández, PCE politbureau member (Madrid, 8 August 1936)
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Has the working class in arms now to defend the democratic republic? Is the working class of Catalonia and Spain sacrificing itself and shedding its blood to return to the republic of Sr. Azaña? (‘No!’ shouted the audience) … Comrades, all the concrete problems of the democratic revolution, which the bourgeoisie failed to carry out in five years, have been resolved by the proletariat in arms in as many days. (Applause.)
Andreu Nin, POUM leader (Barcelona, 6 September 1936)
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First we must win the war and afterwards we can talk of revolution.
Largo Caballero, prime minister (30 October 1936)
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It is necessary, above all, to ensure the collaboration of Azaña and his group to help them overcome their hesitation. This is necessary to prevent the enemies of Spain considering her a communist republic and thus to avert their open intervention which is the greatest danger for republican Spain …
Letter from Stalin, Molotov and Voroshilov to prime minister Largo Caballero (21 December 1936)
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There are some who say that at this stage we should fight for the socialist revolution, and there are others who say that we are practising a deception, that we are manoeuvering to conceal our real policy when we declare that we are defending the democratic republic. Nevertheless, comrades, we are fighting for a democratic republic, and furthermore, for a democratic and parliamentary republic.
Santiago Carrillo, JSU secretary-general (Speech at first JSU national conference, January 1937)
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It should be clearly understood that we are not fighting for the democratic republic. We are fighting for the triumph of the proletarian revolution. The revolution and the war are inseparable. Everything that is said to the contrary is reformist counterrevolution.
CNT–FAI Boletín de Informatión (January 1937)
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What do the comrades of the CNT accuse us of? According to them we have diverged from the path of revolutionary marxism. Why? Because we defend the democratic republic … Well, this republic is of a special type. A parliamentary democratic republic with a profound social content such as has never before existed …
Mundo Obrero, PCE organ (Madrid, March 1937)
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Civil war being the continuation of class politics by other means, politics inevitably conditioned the means and ends on both sides. In the Popular Front zone, the failure of the proletarian revolution to consolidate itself politically and militarily in the very difficult conditions of the first three months, meant the emergence of a new political option. It was expressed in a slogan: Victory in the war first as the guarantee of making the revolution.
If the war were not won, maintained the communists (with the agreement of the republicans and right-wing socialists), the revolution could not triumph. Losing the war meant losing the revolution. Who could dispute this elementary proposition? Except by standing it on its head: if the revolution did not triumph, the war could not be won. Losing the revolution meant losing the war. Either way there was polarization. War-and-revolution, revolution-and-war.
And then – what revolution? Democratic? Socialist? Libertarian? Centralized, de-centralized, self-managed, state-run? The answer would determine the course of the war. In the life-and-death struggle being waged against the common enemy, many lives were to be lost – assassinated – in the bitter polemic between working-class organizations aroused by the question.
—It was the great theoretical and concrete problem of the war, recognized Josep SOLE BARBERA, Catalan communist lawyer. Could revolution co-exist with the anti-fascist struggle, or must the latter dominate and political problems remain subordinate until the end of the war? Were the people fighting to defend the republic of February 1936, a democratic, liberal, open republic, or were they fighting to transform that republic into a socialist, syndicalist or some other type of republic? We communists maintained the former …
In accord with the communist party’s pre-war political line,12 the revolutionary upsurge sweeping the Popular Front zone was carrying through the bourgeois democratic revolution. This had to be completed before the socialist revolution could appear on the historical agenda. The transformation of society which was indisputably taking place, thought Francisco ABAD, a communist soldier, would eliminate feudalism on the land and in the economy. The stages in the political and economic development of a society could not be by-passed; the bourgeois democratic revolution had to precede the passage to socialism. Meanwhile, it was impermissible that the revolutionary situation should be used to take measures opposed to that revolution – like the workers seizing factories and running them.
—That wasn’t a revolutionary m
easure; moreover, it was carried out not by the government but by political organizations. We were opposed to it. We were engaged in a civil war in which the republic’s total potential had to be mobilized. If we began by taking away from certain capitalists their factories and workshops, production would be disorganized, paralysed. Such so-called revolutionary measures went far beyond what the people were ready for, what they wanted. Our party could not go against the will of the people …
Even as it lost strength to the Caballero Popular Front government, this inchoate, multiform revolution continued to defy the Procrustean efforts to fit it into its correct historical stage. The communist party, in consequence, had to reformulate its definition of the revolutionary stage. Early in March 1937, an amplified plenum of the party’s central committee in Valencia heard that the struggle had gone beyond the republic of February 1936, to a ‘democratic, parliamentary republic of a new type and with a profound social content’. It would not be a democratic republic like that of France or any other capitalist country, said José Díaz, the party’s secretary-general. ‘We are fighting to destroy the material foundations on which reaction and fascism rest; for without their destruction no true political democracy can exist … ’ The large landowners, the financial and industrial oligarchy, the politico-economic power of the church and the army were the bases which had to be destroyed.
‘And now I ask: To what extent have [they] been destroyed? In every province we control, big landowners no longer exist. The church, as a dominant power, has likewise ceased to exist. Militarism has also disappeared never to return. Nor are there any big bankers and industrialists.’ The guarantee that these conquests would never be lost lay in the fact that the ‘genuine antifascist people’ – the workers, peasants, intellectuals and petty bourgeoisie – were armed. ‘And precisely for that reason, because we have a guarantee that our conquests will not be lost, we should not lose our heads … by trying to introduce experiments in libertarian communism and socialization … ’13
The destruction of the old ruling order, as José Díaz observed, had already been achieved; the revolution had not limited itself to ‘defending the republic established on 14 April and revived last 16 February’ as the communist party had maintained at the start of the war. Communist militants in the front lines around Madrid, like Miguel NUÑEZ, an education militiaman, were well aware of the depth of the popular explosion.
—It was a thorough-going revolution. The people were fighting for all those things which the reactionary forces of this country had so long denied them. Land and liberty, an end to exploitation, the overthrow of capitalism. The people were not fighting for a bourgeois democracy, let’s be quite clear about that …
—True, the socialist revolution was not on the agenda for us, recalled Narciso JULIAN, communist armoured train commander. But what was quite clear was that the struggle for democracy and socialism was linked. There was, in Lenin’s words, no Chinese wall between the two. Democratic conquests which the republic had been unable to make were now being achieved with incredible speed. Not all of them were orientated towards the war effort; many were made with a wider view of future perspectives. We continued to struggle for socialism, but we didn’t believe, like the anarchists, that everything could be achieved in one fell swoop …
A profound revolutionary rupture had occurred, thought NUÑEZ. The first real land reform, over 5 million hectares of land distributed, the major industries and the banks under workers’ control – ‘a control which admittedly sometimes went too far’ – the old oligarchy swept aside. ‘This was a national revolutionary war, like South Vietnam. National because it was essential to incorporate the anti-fascist petty bourgeoisie who had to be offered certain guarantees, a democratic perspective.’
Would it not have been appropriate to have created revolutionary structures to lead this democratic revolution? Soviets?
—No, had we done so we would have been changing the historic phase. It would have assumed that we were making the socialist revolution. Instead, certain ‘forms of being’ I would call them were being created, not to organize power but to win victory in the war. The Popular Army, whose creation absorbed our energies even to the detriment of other things, was the prime example. Moreover, if we had come out in favour of socialism, fascism would have found allies the more easily. The democratic countries imposed Non-Intervention on the republic as it was. What would they have done if we had come out immediately for socialism? They would have left fascism’s hands even freer …
He was convinced that the road to socialism was the one the communist party was following. But rather than spend time discussing what this revolutionary transformation of society should consist of, it was more important to sacrifice everything in order to win the war. It was sufficiently revolutionary to throw back fascism, save democracy. ‘If we saved democracy, the people would give the final answer –’
The dichotomy of war first, revolution later, represented, in this view, a false dilemma.
—A play on words, observed José SANDOVAL, communist party organizer of the 11th division. On the one hand because a profound revolution was being made; on the other, because it was common sense that to devote all one’s energy to making the revolution with the enemy at your gate was like tending your garden and ignoring the elephant about to trample all over it …
The real problem, he believed, did not lie in the fact that one sector was bent on making the revolution and the other in devoting all its energies to the war. The real problem was – how to make the revolution, what sort of revolution and how could this revolution, given that the former ruling class’s power had been destroyed, contribute to winning the war. ‘Had there been no revolution, it would have been impossible to sustain the war for three months, let alone three years.’
The revolution that the communist party was pursuing, in his view, was being made in the course of the war against fascism. It had to be made with all those forces prepared to defend democratic liberties at home and abroad. No communist ever believed that France or England would intervene directly; but to protect her rear, France might allow arms purchased in the Soviet Union and Mexico to be shipped to the republic through her territory, for example. The French and British failure was lamentable. But the communist party’s strategy of seeking alliances with all democratic forces in the fight against fascism remained correct all the same.
—It corresponded to the needs of the international communist movement14 and to the internal needs of republican Spain. It countered the myth that we Spanish communists were Bolsheviks bent on making the communist revolution. A revolution was being made – but a new sort of revolution, one that opened up perspectives of a socialist revolution later. This was not the revolution of a single party. Our revolution was seeking new, pluralistic paths to socialism …
In the first eight months of the war, the communist party more than doubled in size to 250,000 members. Their social composition revealed the source of the new recruitment. Alongside 87,000 industrial workers, artisans and shopkeepers and 62,000 landworkers, there were 76,000 peasant owners, 15,500 middle class and 7,000 intellectual and liberal professionals. The petty bourgeoisie made up 40 per cent of the party;15 55 per cent was rural-based, consisting of either peasant owners or landworkers.
The strength of the communist party was to have a coherent policy where others had none; to be monolithically united where others were split.16 ‘The party knows what it wants and where it is going,’ in José Díaz’s words. Its determination to shape the revolution to the correct historic stage which, at the same time, opened ‘democratic perspectives’ for a petty bourgeoisie terrified by the libertarian revolution in order to keep that class in the anti-fascist struggle, had brought it success in membership and influence. Along with Soviet aid and the party’s indisputable dedication to the military effort, defence of small property, especially rural, was a decisive factor. The communist party proposed the peasantry’s complete freedom. Even the petty bourgeois Esque
rra’s measure requiring all Catalan peasants to join a single union to sell their crops and control prices was viewed with displeasure because it ‘suppressed the peasants’ total freedom to sell their produce and killed all stimulus to produce more’.17 It proposed to give the peasantry as their property the estates confiscated from landowners who had sided with the military rebels.18 War and revolution was to be prosecuted with free enterprise in the rural rearguard.
Defence of the democratic republic stood to make larger gains for the communist party than if it had decided in the first months of the war that this stage was completed and a new historic phase had opened, for the libertarians and left socialists already occupied the latter terrain. The proletarian revolution, on the other hand, lost a great deal. However, as the Spanish section of the Third International (under a relatively new and young leadership – José Díaz, the secretary general, had been a party member only seven years) the PCE would have found it difficult to pursue options unapproved by the Comintern. And the latter, which had dispatched some of its leading figures to Spain, was categoric. In Stalin’s words, it was ‘necessary to prevent the enemies of Spain considering her a communist republic … ’19 Irrespective of how far the masses had advanced, external (the Soviet Union’s desire for an alliance with the bourgeois democracies of Britain and France against Hitler) and internal reasons (the communist party’s desire to keep bourgeois democrats in a wide anti-fascist alliance and ensure the benevolence of Britain and France) coincided in the inappropriateness of advancing the historical stage.
The politics represented by this Popular Front option were translated into concrete and specific policies which determined how the war was fought. Theory, historical stages, here became life-and-death realities, as the combatants knew. Among them Timoteo RUIZ, the young peasant who started the war with a lance in his native village and later joined the 5th Regiment and the communist party, felt that not everything was right.