Blood of Spain

by Ronald Fraser

  18. Elorza, ‘La mentalidad absolutista en los orígenes de la España contemporánea’, in La utopía anarquista bajo la segunda república española.

  19. Friars’ abodes, as opposed to those of monks, are called convents in Spanish, as also are nunneries.

  20. See also Militancies 15, pp. 419–21.

  21. See Episodes 5, pp. 298–300; also, Fraser, op. cit., pp. 102–3.

  22. And also liberal petty bourgeois and proletarian opinion. One of the reasons for the attacks on convents, as much as on churches, was that the regular clergy virtually monopolized secondary education to the benefit of the children of the rich.

  23. Uneven development applied even to the church which had historically developed somewhat differently in the Basque country. It had never been a landowner there, the Inquisition had never held direct jurisdiction and, under the original fueros of Vizcaya, the bishop was prohibited from entering his diocese because his appointment by the king of Spain was considered political. Relations with the ‘Spanish’ hierarchy were never close, since Toledo was considered ‘centralist’.

  24. Significantly, separation of church and state figured in General Mola’s political programme for the uprising. The Cortes approved separation by a vote of 278 to 41. But on Article 26, which limited the activities of the religious orders and dissolved others, notably the Jesuits, almost half the deputies avoided participating, and the vote was 178 to 59 (see Jackson, The Spanish Republic and the Civil War, p. 51).

  25. The prime minister said that the religious situation of a country was not constituted by the ‘numerical sum of beliefs and believers, but by the creative effort of its spirit, the direction followed by its culture’. In this sense, Spain had been Catholic in the sixteenth century and, despite its millions of believers, no longer was today. (Jackson, op. cit., p. 50.) A statement which was both provocative and bound to be misinterpreted by his enemies.

  26. See Militancies 14, pp. 414–16.

  27. It appears that he first proclaimed the Catalan republican state and called for a confederation of Iberian peoples. This, however, was shortly changed to the Catalan republic ‘as an integral state of an Iberian federation’; and later, on the insistence of representatives of the new republican government in Madrid, he agreed to await the drafting of an autonomy statute (see J. A. González Casanova, ‘La proclamació de la república a Catalunya’, in Canigó (Barcelona, April 1975).

  28. Payne, El nacionalismo vasco, p. 171.

  29. The difference between Catalonia and the state as a whole can be rapidly seen in the following statistic of the percentage distribution of the working population in 1930, the all-Spanish percentage figuring in brackets.

  Source: Balcells, Cataluña Contemporánea II (1900–1936), pp. 60–61.

  The proportions of those engaged in agriculture and industry are approximately reversed. Unfortunately, I have been unable to find a directly comparable statistic for the Basque country. The Basque nationalists claimed in the 1930s that with 5 per cent of the Spanish state’s total population they produced 24 per cent of the banking capital, 42 per cent of all bank deposits, 33 per cent of all personal savings, 78 per cent and 74 per cent respectively of all iron and steel production, 71 per cent of all paper and naval industry. (Payne, El nacionalismo vasco, p. 163.) Catalonia, with 12 per cent of the state’s total population, produced 34 per cent of all personal savings, 31 per cent of all electricity, 19.5 per cent of banking capital and 28 per cent of industrial capital (see J. Alzina, L’economía de la Catalunya autònoma, Barcelona, 1933, cited in Balcells, op. cit., pp. 110–11).

  30. See Ortzi, Historia de Euskadi: el nacionalismo vasco y ETA (Paris, 1975), p. 145. Significantly, the founder of Catalan nationalism, Prat de la Riba, spoke for big Catalan capital, while his Basque counterpart, Sabino Arana, the son of a shipbuilder whose wood ships had been displaced by iron, was hostile to the Basque oligarchy.

  31. A split in the PNV in 1930 led to the creation of Acción Nacionalista Vasca (ANV); but it remained small throughout the republic. See below, pp. 540–41.

  32. ‘In 1933, to ensure that the budget for the services which the state was making over to the Generalitat (the new Catalan government) was the same as the national per capita average, it should have equalled 251.5 million pesetas. That is, 12.1 per cent of the total, since that was the percentage of the Catalan population in the total Spanish population. Instead, the amount (conceded by the central government) was 135 millions’ (Balcells, op. cit., p. 25). The lack of finance capital – the Bank of Catalonia crashed in 1931 – now made itself felt, for the Generalitat had no equivalent of the Bank of Spain behind it.

  33. According to the calculations of the Catalan economist J. Alzina, cited in Balcells, op. cit., pp. 111–12.

  34. The question of electoral abstentionism, so often credited – especially by anarcho-syndicalists–with decisive political results, is only now being studied in depth. In the interim, the comment by Molas, in his El sistema de partidos políticos en Cataluña, 1931–1936, would appear valid for Catalonia. ‘Pure’ anarchists of the FAI almost certainly never voted, while moderate anarcho-syndicalists of the treintista line, and ordinary CNT union members (who were not necessarily anarcho-syndicalists), might very well vote. Molas’s study of a series of elections in Catalonia in the 1930s bears out his view, suggesting that in all probability a majority of the CNT voted for the Esquerra. (For a detailed study of voting patterns in one election in Gerona province, see M. Vilanova, Revista de Geografía, University of Barcelona, Jan.–Dec. 1974; also M. V. Goni, El abstencionismo electoral durante la segunda republica en San Feliu de Guixols, memoria a la Fundación Juan March (unpublished).

  35. See Molas, op. cit., p. 83.

  36. See Molas, op. cit., p. 82.

  37. The lower clergy, with its deep roots in local Basque life, was one of nationalism’s main basis of support. But priests were not permitted to be members of the PNV.

  38. Relative self-government in fiscal, military and administrative matters via municipally elected delegates to the governing juntas generales within the all-Spanish monarchical state.

  39. Whereas Catalan for a Spanish-speaker is a relatively easy language to learn, Basque without any common roots is extremely difficult.

  40. By a vote of 123 to 109 municipalities. As it was a single statute for the four provinces, it meant that it had to be re-elaborated to cover the remaining three: Vizcaya, Guipúzcoa and Alava. (For the situation of Navarre, see p. 541.)

  41. It is worth recalling that mutual suspicion between the two had historical roots: the petty bourgeois republicans in the coalition and those in the PNV were the political heirs respectively of the liberals and Carlists who had fought the civil wars of the nineteenth century.

  42. Solidaridad de Trabajadores Vascos (STV), the Basque nationalist trade union, did, however, order its members out on strike; in consequence a considerable number of PNV members who belonged to STV were involved. ‘But the STV did not order us to support the insurrection. All the factories in the industrial zones of Guipúzcoa and Vizcaya came out on strike, and a number of STV militants were imprisoned afterwards, as were individual PNV members’ (MICHELENA). The STV was ordered to be dissolved by the civil governor after the events.

  43. Reconciliation between PNV and socialist militants began after the defeat of Euzkadi in the war, when they were imprisoned together and came to know each other.

  44. In the vocabulary of Sabino Arana, founder of Basque nationalism, Maketanía was Spain. In his writings, he condemned mixed (Basque-Spanish) marriage, and defended the ‘purity’ of the Basque race and language as a means of preserving the values and forms of Basque life. For a Spaniard to speak Basque would be the ‘ruin’ of these values. (It should be added that the Catalan bourgeoisie tended to refer depreciatingly to immigrant southern workers as Murcianos – Murcia being one of the provinces from which many migrants came.) In Sabino Arana’s view, one of the differences between Catalan and Basque
nationalisms was that the former attempted to attract Spaniards to its policies while Basque nationalism consisted in ‘spontaneously rejecting Spaniards as foreigners’. (I am indebted to M. Heiberg and M. Escudero for this observation contained in Sabino Arana’s ‘Minuta: Errores Catalanistas’, Obras completas, Bayonne, 1965, p. 401.)

  45. Ramón de la Sota, one of the few large Bilbao industrialists to support Basque nationalism, refused a Spanish title and accepted a British knighthood for his services after the First World War.

  46. The CADCI (Centre Autonomista de Dependents del Comerç i de la Indústria) and the rabassaires ’ (peasants) union deserted the Esquerra, going over progressively to working-class political postures during the republic. (See Molas, op. cit., p. 86, and Balcells, op. cit., p. 36.)

  47. ‘Including more than 9,000 farming families, each of whom might have six to eight members’(ROBLES).

  48. Ortzi, Historia de Euzkadi: el nacionalismo vasco y ETA, p. 207, discusses the socio-economic structure and the peasantry’s political allegiances in greater detail. Of the 400,000 Basque-speakers in the 1930s, 80,000 were in Navarre, 10,000 in Alava and the rest in Vizcaya and Guipúzcoa. The population of Navarre was 350,000, Vizcaya 500,000, Guipúzcoa 311,000 and Alava 105,000.

  49. The Navarrese fueros, in terms of self-government, were more extensive than those of the Basque provinces which had been reduced in 1876 to a ‘concierto económico’ or the right to negotiate a global tax contribution to the central government and apportion the tax-raising themselves.

  50. I. Puente, El comunismo libertario, 1932, re-edited Toulouse, 1947, cited in Mintz, L’Autogestion dans l’Espagne révolutionnaire, p. 36.

  51. Tierra y Libertad (August 1931).

  52. El Libertario (November 1932). Both cited in Elorza, La utopía anarquista bajo la segunda república española, pp. 357 and 376.

  53. When they voted, anarcho-syndicalists opted normally for petty bourgeois republican parties like the Esquerra in Catalonia (which depended on their vote to remain in office) or the radical socialists; they would not normally vote for an ‘authoritarian marxist’ working-class party (see section C).

  54. Lorenzo, Los anarquistas españoles y el poder, p. 40.

  55. J. Peiró, Sindicalismo (April 1933), no. 10; cited in Elorza, op. cit., p. 403. My emphasis.

  56. Les syndicats ouvriers et la révolution sociale, by Pierre Besnard, the French syndicalist writer whose work in translation was influential in Spain at this time. See Mintz, op. cit., p. 34.

  57. The basic CNT structure since 1918 had been the industrial branch union, e.g. each trade working within the building industry had its own section within the overall building workers’ union, each section being represented on the union’s leadership. (There were no paid union officials, no strike funds and dues were modest.) Each union was represented on a local federation of syndicates which, with the local unions, federated at the regional level in a regional committee. A national committee existed but, with the exception of the secretary, this was composed up to the war of CNT militants in the city where the committee had its seat. There was no direct organizational link between the same branch unions in different regions; such links as existed were arranged by the local federations or regional committees, which were the decisive forces in each area. This corresponded to the anarcho-syndicalist concept of local autonomy and federalism, but made coordinated union action at national level more difficult. National Industrial Federations, approved at the 1931 Madrid congress, were combated by the ultra-left ‘purists’ as potentially bureaucratic organisms which threatened local autonomies, both in the present and in the post-revolutionary future where they would have a large part in the running of the economy. Moreover, they required industrial unions as their base. The latter (as set up in the Badalona textile industry early in 1936) included everyone engaged in the industry, from the workers making textile machinery to all those engaged in the wholesale and retail garment trade, and bringing in the technicians and foremen alongside the workers at all levels of the industry. ‘The advocates of the old branch unions disliked this new structure because the former could be mobilized much more easily by its central leadership since its members were, in the main, a despairing proletariat. In the industrial union, the membership of technicians and foremen meant there was more likelihood of actions proposed by the specific anarchist groups being blocked,’ in the words of Josep Costa, secretary of the new Badalona industrial union, and a militant with a long CNT past. The branch unions continued to dominate the CNT, the industrial union movement having made little headway by the outbreak of war; only a few National Industrial Federations were created.

  58. García Oliver, interview October 1931, La Tierra, cited in El movimiento libertario español (Paris, 1974).

  59. This included Casas Viejas where government assault guards assassinated a score of anarcho-syndicalists who resisted. The Azaña government never fully recovered from the scandal which marked the beginning of the end of the republican-socialist coalition.

  60. In August 1931, the Catalan regional CNT claimed nearly 400,000 members (58 per cent of the workers of both sexes in Barcelona were affiliated); in March 1933, the figure had dropped to 208,000, and by May 1936, to 142,000. The latter figure still represented 20 per cent of all Catalan workers and 30 per cent of the industrial working class (see Molas, El sistema de partídos políticos en Cataluña, 1931–1936, pp. 117, 119).

  61. See Balcells, Cataluña contemporánea II (1900–1936), p. 17.

  62. The 1931 split had been prefigured under the dictatorship when a group of militants, led by Pestaña, favoured an attempt to legalize the CNT by renouncing its anarchist aims. The FAI founding meetings had on the agenda a discussion of the ‘Archinov Platform’ – a proposal by Russian anarchists exiled in France to take measures to prevent the possible influence of the communist party in the libertarian movement; this was not discussed at the meetings, however, because the Platform had not been translated. (See the Synthesis of the minutes of the FAI founding meetings, in El movimiento libertario español, op. cit., p. 293.) Prior to the FAI’s foundation (whose existence as a clandestine organization was not announced for two years), Abad de Santillán was militating in favour of the presence of anarchist groups in the trade union leadership to ensure the permanence of a ‘specifically anarchist workers’ movement’. The theory of the ‘bond’ between anarchist groups and the trade union was designed to prevent communist infiltration and anarcho-syndicalism’s deviation to reformism or pure syndicalism. (See Elorza, La utopía anarquista bajo la segunda república española, p. 413.) These ideas did not go entirely unheeded in Barcelona; but at the same time it is erroneous to conceive of the FAI as an anarchist force exterior to the CNT; it was part of the latter and represented a tendency which, to one degree or another, had existed in the movement virtually since its inception.

  63. Attempts to discover a symbiotic relationship between Catalan and Andalusian anarcho-syndicalism, seeing the latter as fuelling the former’s revolutionary anarchism with waves of impoverished migrant workers, founder on the facts of migration. Andalusian migration was minimal (see Malefakis, Agrarian Reform and Peasant Revolution in Spain, pp. 104–6). In Barcelona (city) in 1930, Andalusians represented only 4.2 per cent of the population, the third group of non-Catalans behind the Levant with 13.2 per cent, and Aragon with 8 per cent (Balcells, op. cit., p. 61). While at times in the past the movement had numerically favoured Andalusia, the leadership had been dominated by Catalans. The failure to sustain a specific day-labourers’ and peasants’ union is perhaps significant in this respect. This is not to deny the importance of non-Catalan workers in the movement; the members of the small but influential Nosotros group were almost all non-Catalans (Durruti, Ascaso, Sanz, Vivancos, etc.), García Oliver being the outstanding exception.

  64. As far back as 1919, Eleuterio Quintanilla, the Asturian anarchist leader, had argued for the unification of the UGT and CNT on equal terms and through a joi
nt Congress which would create a new trade union organization; the CNT had voted instead to ‘absorb’ the UGT, giving the latter’s members three months to join or be declared scabs. At the same congress, Quintanilla argued in favour of creating national industrial federations; the CNT voted against. He went on to propose that the Bolshevik revolution must be defended against its capitalist aggressors although it did not represent the ‘dictatorship of the people in arms’ but rather the dictatorship of a government, however revolutionary; the CNT voted to join the Third International provisionally. The ultra-leftism of the Catalan movement was already beginning to make itself felt. So opposed was Quintanilla to splitting the working-class movement, that he opposed the creation of a CNT miners’ union in Asturias, believing that an opposition to the UGT’s reformist policies should remain in the socialist union to capitalize on the miners’ revolutionary instincts and to bring the union round to authentic syndicalism. (When a CNT miners’ union was formed, it was led for several years by communist militants, also in disagreement with the reformism of the Asturian socialist mineworkers’ union.)

  65. Caballero’s shift was no sudden change of attitude, as has been usually assumed. Marta Bizcarrondo has shown that his ideas on collaboration with bourgeois regimes and proletarian revolution were those of thirteen years earlier. This did not prevent them being ambivalent and reformist, however (see M. Bizcarrondo, Araquistaín y la crisis socialista en la II república. Leviatán, Madrid, 1975).

  66. See p. 85; also P. Preston, ‘Spain’s October Revolution and the Rightist Grasp for Power,’ Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 10 (1975).