Blood of Spain

by Ronald Fraser

  This tendency, with its virulent a-politicism, anti-parliamentarianism, anti-militarism, anti-clericalism, its deep hostility to all government and political parties – including (especially) working-class parties53 – saw as its fundamental methods of action the insurrectional strike, sabotage, boycott and mutiny. The popular dimension of its ideology could be expressed in a series of equations: politics = ‘the art of cheating the people’; parties = ‘no difference between any of them’; elections = ‘swindle’; parliament = ‘the place of corruption’; the army = ‘the organization of collective crime’; the police = ‘paid assassins of the bourgeoisie’.54

  It was by no means a totally false image of the monarchy. Was it a functional image to deal with the realities of the republic? Most agreed that it was.

  Held in tension with this view was the other, the syndicalist. In essence a view shaped by industrialization, it centred on the premise that, in order to overthrow the bourgeois order, a strong, proletarian organization was needed: the sindicato. ‘For us the social revolution is not just a matter of rising violently against the organized forces of the state … The social revolution consists in taking over factories and mines, the land and the railways, all the means of production, to put them at the people’s disposal. It is not sufficient to take over social wealth, it is necessary to know how to use it – and to use it immediately, without any discontinuity.’ 55

  The crucial role in this revolutionary and post-revolutionary process devolved on the sindicato, since the overthrow of capitalism did not signify a rupture with capitalist productive structures but the necessity of ensuring their continuing functioning under trade union management; this, in turn, required organization and discipline.

  The trade union had a triple function: under capitalism it (1) acted to defend the proletariat’s interests while (2) ‘preparing, by its practical and educational activities, the economic framework of a new social, egalitarian order’, which (3) after the revolution it would realize by carrying through ‘the economic transformations which permit the consolidation of libertarian communism as the first stage of the free commune’.56

  Because of increasing capitalist concentration and because of the role the unions would be called on to play in the post-revolutionary society, National Industrial Federations would be needed to link local industrial unions, each of the latter being responsible for organizing relations between each factory within its local industry – the factory or workplace having been taken over by its union committee which would administer it.57

  Common to both tendencies was the idea that the working class ‘simply’ took over factories and workplaces and ran them collectively but otherwise as before. ‘No one supposes that after the revolution the factories will function backwards … all workers will have to do the same as they did the day before … ’58 Underlying this vision of simple continuity was the anarcho-syndicalist concept of the revolution not as a rupture with, the destruction and replacement of, the bourgeois order but as the latter’s displacement. The taking over of factories and workplaces, however violently carried out, was not the beginning of the revolution to create a new order but its final goal. This view, in turn, was conditioned by a particular view of the state. Any state (bourgeois or working class) was considered an oppressive power tout court – not as the organization of a particular class’s coercive power. The ‘state’, in consequence, rather than the existence of the capitalist mode of production which gave rise to its particular form, often appeared as the major enemy. The state did not have to be taken, crushed and a new – revolutionary – power established. No. If it could be swept aside, abolished, everything else, including oppression, disappeared. The capitalist order was simply displaced by the new-won workers’ freedom to administer the workplaces they had taken over. Self-organized in autonomous communes or in all-powerful syndicates, the workers, as the primary factor in production, dispensed with the bourgeoisie. The consequences of this were seen in the 1936 Barcelona revolution; capitalist production and market relations continued to exist within collectivized industry.

  Within two months of the Madrid Congress which declared war on the republic, thirty leading CNT militants signed a manifesto maintaining their adherence to the position that revolution would not be made exclusively by minorities, however audacious, but by the ‘overwhelming movement of the working masses. We want a revolution that springs from the people, not a revolution that a few individuals can make … ’ The ultra-left, concentrated in the FAI, immediately attacked the treintistas (as the thirty signers and – by extension – their supporters came to be known) as reformist and counter-revolutionary. The feuding grew excessively bitter and within a year unions with some 70,000 members had been expelled from the CNT. The anarcho-syndicalist confederation, which had just emerged from clandestinity under the dictatorship with a membership of over half a million, split along the line of its major tension.

  Sebastià CLARA, a former corkworker and now a reporter on the CNT’s major Barcelona paper, Solidaridad Obrera, was one of the manifesto’s thirty signers. In his view, the manifesto was not counter-revolutionary, but a new formulation of how to achieve revolution in opposition to the FAI’s tactics. The mass of CNT members was not at that moment prepared to leap into the unknown of revolution. They had joined the CNT to defend their class interests, and what they wanted was to be able to operate openly as a trade union. ‘That was why they had struggled to bring in the republic, and why they welcomed it when it was proclaimed.’ What was needed now was political realism and agility to build on this movement for revolutionary ends.

  Ricardo SANZ, member of the FAI and the Nosotros (‘Us’) group in Barcelona, which included such leading militants as Durruti, Francisco Ascaso and García Oliver, did not disagree that both the CNT and the working masses were unprepared for revolution. But that fact could lead to radically different conclusions.

  —After seven years of clandestinity, the members generally didn’t know where they were going or what they wanted. In such a situation, what was needed was practice, exercise, revolutionary gymnastics. We were the motor or spark that could get those gymnastics going …

  The ‘gymnastics’ had definite objectives, specific dates: January 1932, January 1933, December 1933 – revolutionary insurrections to inaugurate libertarian communism. The first was practically confined to the mining zone of Catalonia; the second spread into agricultural villages in Levant and Andalusia;59 the third affected mainly villages in Aragon and La Rioja. While each mobilized more participants than its predecessor, none of them was the spark that set the countryside alight; with a few notable exceptions, the landless day labourers and peasantry failed to respond in strength. But each, more seriously than the last, threatened republican order.

  —We weren’t unduly disappointed at the failure; from the beginning, given the situation, we doubted whether they could have effective results. But as we were convinced – we, the working class that had been formed under the dictatorship, especially the youth – that such exercises were needed, we carried them out. The working class had to learn to head towards the conquest, not of the state, not of power – we never spoke of these – but of the means of production and consumption …

  A large sector of the Catalan anarcho-syndicalist movement was in agreement with neither side in the dispute. Anarchists like Andreu Capdevila (see Militancies 6, pp. 213–16) and anarcho-syndicalists like Josep COSTA, of the CNT textile union in Badalona, were hostile to the revolutionary gymnastics. In the latter’s view, the mood of the working class was opposed to these insurrectionary uprisings, which, moreover, did great harm to the CNT.

  —We lost at least a quarter of our membership in Badalona in that period.60 A lot of us, who supported neither side, but adopted a ‘centrist’ position, ‘went home to sleep’. Our textile union was virtually paralysed by the dispute …

  —The FAI wanted to make the libertarian revolution, to attain a society without God or Bosses, without laws or police fo
rces, using human material that wasn’t prepared for it, reflected Josep ROBUSTE, a CNT book-keeper. The FAI was acting like a political group within the CNT, taking its own decisions and trying to impose them on the CNT, talking of liberty and acting like dictators …

  Some leading militants who shared his views were not only expelled from their unions but thrown out of work. He began to think that what was needed was what the UGT enjoyed – a real political party which could express the CNT’s demands and needs at the political level and further awaken the workers’ consciousness.

  From an anarchist perspective, the FAI was not totally incorrect in understanding that inherent in the treintista position was a ‘politicization’, a ‘reformism’, nor in seeing the dangers contained in the new republican regime’s political need to ‘incorporate’ the working class. In fact, however, when Angel Pestaña, a treintista and former CNT leader, founded the syndicalist party, which ROBUSTE joined, few members, even among the treintista unions, could be recruited. Politics remained anathema, loyalty to anarcho-syndicalism high.

  The form the split took was not only organizational but generational, often almost personal. Its immediate history lay in the previous decade. After the economic boom of the First World War and increasing proletarian militancy, Catalan employers confronted lean times by attempting to crush the anarcho-syndicalist movement in Barcelona. The crushing took the form of creating ‘yellow’ unions and, with the authorities’ approval and leadership, the hiring of gunmen to assassinate CNT leaders. A spiral of assassination and counter-assassination began: more than 800 criminal assaults on life – 440 against workers, 218 against employers and their subordinates, the rest against the authorities – took place between 1917 and 1923.61

  The boom had brought new young workers into the city and the CNT. These, formed in this harsh, bloody struggle, became a new type of militant. This was the moment when the Solidarios group (forerunner of the Nosotros group and with many of the same militants) was formed, expressly to take revenge for workers’ assassinations, not on the gunmen who executed them, but on the employers who paid and organized them. When, soon afterwards, the dictatorship outlawed the CNT, scores of militants had to flee to France and elsewhere, to return only when the republic was proclaimed. Sebastià CLARA, the treintista signatory, was among them.

  —Before the 1920s, the CNT was an organization in which the masses could express themselves democratically. Afterwards, this was no longer the case. Things changed with the creation of the FAI in 1927. It was they who now imposed their decisions …

  It had to be remembered, he stressed, that the level of revolutionary culture was very low. Militants had, at best, read one or two pamphlets, and Kropotkin’s Conquest of Bread. They hadn’t read Marx, Engels, let alone Hegel. ‘The libertarian movement was suspicious of, hostile to, intellectuals – intellectuals who could have helped the movement greatly.’

  Although complaint about the FAI’s methods, especially in Barcelona, was common, it would be mistaken to suppose that the FAI was a cohesive ‘political’ grouping throughout Spain. It was a federation of individual anarchist groups (each of which was formed on the principle of personal ‘affinity’); there was no general FAI ‘line’ which all groups had to adhere to. Such would have run counter to the very nature of anarchism.

  Progreso FERNANDEZ, a Valencian anarchist who had been living and working in France, returned to his native city, on behalf of Spanish anarchist groups in France, to attend the FAI’s founding meeting, ‘in the large covered yard of a companion’s house, on 24 July, 1927’. The next day, the thirty to forty delegates from all over Spain and Portugal met among the pine trees of El Saler where some of the participants were on the alert to bury all the documents in the sand if surprised.

  —The purpose of forming a federation of the anarchist groups scattered all over Spain was that they should emerge from their ivory towers to propagate revolutionary anarchist ideals to the working class – inevitably in clandestine forms at that time since we were under the dictatorship and the CNT was outlawed. All the founding members were also CNT members. The allegation that the FAI was set up to manipulate and control the CNT was completely false. There was no fear at that moment that the CNT was going to fall into the trap of revisionism; the only problem was that attempts were being made to legalize the CNT on the model of the UGT.62 Nor is it true to say that the FAI was created to maintain the CNT’s ideological purity. It is, of course, possible that in certain regions like Catalonia the FAI’s role was conceived like that; but it was not the case in Valencia …

  The FAI’s specific weight in Catalonia was almost certainly greater than in other regions; and this, in itself, appeared to give it even greater importance since the weight of the Catalan CNT within the Confederation was indisputable. And within the Catalan CNT, it was Barcelona which dominated.63

  The CNT in other regions of Spain, especially where the UGT was the major union, was not able or willing to afford the voluntarism of revolutionary gymnastics. In Madrid, for example, the small CNT unions had had a different experience under the dictatorship: in place of the violence that reigned in Barcelona, the half-dozen Madrid unions joined the UGT (on an individual member basis) to protect themselves and to attract new members. Miguel GONZALEZ INESTAL, a leading CNT and FAI militant in the capital, believed that this had made an important difference in their trajectory.

  —For example, we considered the Catalan FAI’s insurrectionary attempts dangerous, while admiring their initiative and combativeness. But there could be no doubt that these revolutionary uprisings and strikes were wearing down the militants’ fighting spirit and the organization itself. We could see that difficult times were looming ahead, given the right’s attitude, and that combativeness was going to be needed. Considerable sections of the Libertarian movement in Levant, Andalusia and Asturias supported our position …

  There were, he thought, two major tendencies within the FAI. One which believed it necessary to build up a strong trade union organization, educate the members and prepare the organizational means for revolution. The other was ‘formed in the shadow of certain groups which wanted to control the CNT – although this was not part of the FAI’s founding principles’ – and succeeded to a large extent in its aim in Barcelona. ‘Many times one could say it was the Barcelona tendency against the rest of Spain.’ Madrid remained solidly in the first tendency, although when the split occurred, it opposed the treintista movement as reformist.

  —One of the things that most damaged the working-class movement, we believed, was the type of trade unionism which concentrated purely on wage claims and improvements in working conditions. It was necessary to retain the moral, doctrinal and cultural traditions of anarchism, the ideals which could raise the level of the members in human terms …

  In Asturias, the treintista split had no serious repercussions. The Asturian FAI did not share the Catalan posture. Ramón ALVAREZ, secretary of the CNT regional committee, and an FAI militant, explained his members’ views to a national CNT plenum in Madrid.

  —‘Revolution isn’t the same as a strike which can be called for a certain day of the month. Revolution is a social phenomenon, which ripens in its own time, which man’s consciousness influences, accelerates, retards, but which does not happen simply because someone sets a date –’ In Asturias, we thought that those who believed Spain was ready for revolution were victims of their own enthusiasm – an enthusiasm we shared up to a point – instead of making a calm, lucid analysis of the situation …

  Not that the theory of revolutionary gymnastics was totally wrong he believed; had the CNT been an organization that simply sat back waiting while its members paid their dues, it would have been caught by surprise by the military on 18 July.

  In the general elections of November 1933, the CNT called on its members to abstain; this overtly political move represented the libertarian movement’s profound disillusionment with the republic, which had solved few if any of the problems fa
ced by the working class, and had harshly repressed the anarcho-syndicalists who had participated in the insurrections. Allied with other factors (the women’s vote for the first time, the disarray of the republican–socialist coalition and the cohesion of the right-wing reaction under CEDA leadership), the CNT’s abstention resulted in the right’s victory. The CNT had promised to launch a revolution if this happened; their rising in December 1933 was the third in just under two years. The Asturian CNT was in disagreement and put forward a ‘political’ alternative. An electoral abstentionist policy must be accompanied by something positive. If the CNT was to prove to the socialists, who had just been ejected from government, that successful proletarian conquests were made in the streets, not in the ballot boxes, then the ground for such conquests had to be laid.

  —Logically, this meant reaching an understanding with the socialists. Success comes to those who organize beforehand, not to those who improvise. I argued this at the 1933 Madrid plenum which decided on abstention. Our thesis was rejected. Durruti and others claimed that if there was a 50 per cent abstention rate the CNT would make the revolution. But the germ of the Workers’ Alliance was already formed in our minds …

  The December insurrection spread through Aragon and La Rioja, but failed within a few days like the two before it. Durruti was the only one of the Nosotros group to take part. However, out of this process came the formidable Asturian alliance with the UGT, initiated by the CNT, and which was sealed between the two unions in March 1934 (see section E).

  Compared to the waves of ultra-leftism which swept the CNT nationally, the Asturian CNT had a long history of revolutionary realism. Perhaps because of its minority position within a strongly proletarian mining region dominated by the social-democratic Asturian mineworkers’ union; perhaps because of its isolation from the extreme southern rural poverty; but certainly because of the presence of one man, Eleuterio Quintanilla, the most formative single influence in Asturian anarcho-syndicalist development, it had always been willing to join in common action with the socialist proletariat in the struggle against the class enemy.64