—The reformists, the state socialists, wanted agrarian reform, wanted everything controlled by the state. When the state said ‘stop’ – stop; when it said ‘render accounts’ – render accounts; when the harvest was in – it would be there demanding its share. We didn’t want that. The land must be in the workers’ hands, worked and managed collectively by them. That was the only way the workers could control their own affairs, ensure that the produce which resulted from their work remained theirs to deal with as they freely decided. Not that each collective could remain isolated, a unit on its own. No! Each would be responsible to the local CNT organization, the local to the regional, the regional to the national. But each would be managed by a committee elected by the collectivists themselves, each at the end of the year would divide up the surplus produced among the collectivists …
Fear that the distribution of land to individual workers, even if they decided to work their plots collectively, meant the continuation of ‘private property’ and the eventual recreation of inequalities of wealth, was another factor militating against the reform, in Moreno’s view. ‘We’d be back where we started from; tomorrow we’d have the bourgeoisie again. And if there was one thing we didn’t need, it was the bourgeoisie.’16
The bourgeoisie formed the bulk of the 200 landowners and all the labradores – the latter outnumbering the former – in Castro. Absentee aristocrats owned a few estates, but leased these to large tenant farmers on easy terms, as tended to be the nobility’s custom. The average size of the estates was some 300 hectares; few reached 550. (In the latifundist south, an estate of 100 hectares was considered large; 250 hectares was a latifundium, and over 500 hectares was a giant holding.) Below this bourgeoisie there was, in Castro, a fairly large ‘middle class’ of small market-gardeners on irrigated plots along the river, artisans, muleteers. The landless day-labourers made up the bulk of the township.
After the death from TB of his father, a labourer, Juan MORENO began work on an estate at the age of ten. His first memory was of losing one of the pigs he had been set to herd and of returning in tears. The foreman docked his ‘ration’ – the little piece of bacon fat which the labourers got in their stew and which was ‘about the only nourishment in it’. He had begun his apprenticeship.
Soon he was working in the fields, ploughing, sowing, reaping with the sickle on the estates where the hired hands spent fixed periods of time, ‘always hungry on the little food they gave us, thin as rakes’, sleeping on straw in earth-floored sheds, ‘all together as though in a barracks’. The straw was the rougher stuff the oxen and mules refused as fodder. The men took off their boots and waistcoats to sleep. ‘In spring we went to the animal stalls, you couldn’t sleep in the dormitory for the fleas.’ In a good year, employment might last eight months, in a bad year perhaps not even six. There was no unemployment pay.
The problem, declared a Castro anarchist in 1919, was ‘not only one of bread, but of hatred’.17 The problem had not changed a decade and a half later.
—We hated the bourgeoisie, they treated us like animals. They were our worst enemies. When we looked at them we thought we were looking at the devil himself. And they thought the same of us. There was a hatred between us – a hatred so great it couldn’t have been greater. They were bourgeois, they didn’t have to work to earn a living, they had comfortable lives. We knew we were workers and that we had to work – but we wanted them to pay us a decent wage and to treat us like human beings, with respect. There was only one way to achieve that – by fighting them …
They fought to abolish piece-work which was ‘amoral’ because it obliged a man to work like a brute to earn another peseta; to end the practice of children having to get up in the middle of the night on the estates to feed the mules; to win better food. They fought for more money. But nothing would lessen their hatred of the bourgeoisie and capitalism until the exploitation of man by man was abolished. ‘The bourgeoisie was not needed. Let the workers take over the estates and you’d soon see the truth of that.’ When property was collectivized and everything belonged to the workers, there’d be no capitalism, no need for the state, no necessity for money to exist.
—Everyone would do his usual job, everyone would work. If you needed something, a pair of trousers or a pair of shoes, the collective would procure it from another collective by exchanging its goods. Money wasn’t necessary for anything. Money is the rope round our necks, the greatest danger a people can face. If they need money, there’ll be nothing but slavery, misery on all sides. Look at the large landowner with his millions: he commands more than the state or the guardia civil or anyone. No, we didn’t need money, all that we needed was the wherewithal to be able to live …
The hatred of the bourgeoisie had not abated by 1936. The republic had, if anything, sharpened it. ‘More and more bourgeois were joining the Falange, becoming fascists.’ Nor had the republic brought any benefits for the workers as some republicans believed.
—Those of us who didn’t believe in politics simply laughed. We knew that politics was nothing more than that – politics. Under the republic, under any political system, we workers would remain slaves of our bit of earth, of our work. When it comes down to it, politicians don’t give a damn whether the common lot eat or not. Of course, one regime can give a bit more liberty than another, a little more freedom of expression; but most things it can’t change. In many ways we were worse off under the republic than under the monarchy; the right became even more aggressive and reactionary, and we had to defend ourselves …
* * *
For large sectors of the provincial bourgeoisie beyond the ‘advanced seaboards’ law and order had almost supplanted the religious issue as the major rallying cry. Implicitly, if not explicitly, the cry expressed the demand to defend a traditional way of life, the privileges and material interests of those who thought fit to call themselves, as they always had, ‘la gente de orden’. It was a class which, ideologically, felt itself united by religion, especially the struggle to defend the church.18 In the eyes of this bourgeoisie, the republic had ‘attacked religion’; now it was showing itself incapable of ensuring the safety of bourgeois citizens or the integrity of their property.
The republic had become, in short, a symbol of disorder. ‘So infamous a word among the middle classes,’ recalled the son of a liberal schoolteacher in Córdoba, ‘that any disorder or confusion was simply described as “a republic”.’
Roberto SOLIS, a law student, had welcomed the republic and, within a month, after the convent burnings, had turned against it. The ‘naïve anti-clericalism’ of much of the left struck him as hellish. He had become a CEDA supporter. On the night of the 1936 elections he had gone round Córdoba polling stations; young girls in a working-class district had put him to flight, insulting him in the grossest imaginable terms. The fact of wearing a tie was enough to identify him.
—There was a simple social distinction: those who wore ties and those who didn’t. It was a symbol, the uniform of the middle class …
In fact, he reflected, it was a petty bourgeoisie which knew few luxuries – at home his family didn’t have a bathroom, amongst other things – but which enjoyed one overwhelming privilege: ‘the working class was there to serve us’. Because that was how it had always been, the middle class believed that was how it should remain. Any deviation from the norm was termed ‘communist’.
It was of small consolation that the bourgeoisie’s ‘bogy’ – the communist party – did not share the view that the republic was foundering in disorder, threatening its property. Like most communist militants, Pedro CLAVIJO, secretary-general of the Andalusian communist youth federation, was convinced that the situation was well within limits tolerable to a democratic republic. There was no generalized sense of ‘going out to take over the bourgeoisie’s land’; the land invasions in Andalusia were far less extensive than was often alleged. The peasants – small tenants, for example, who had been unjustly thrown off their land during the two years of c
entre-right government – were correcting injustices done to them. People were confident that the republic could advance towards social reform within the framework of bourgeois democracy – ‘and simultaneously doubtful about the manner in which it was advancing’. The socialist and communist parties kept the government under constant pressure to achieve the widest possible democratization: ‘The sort of thing, to take a contemporary example, that Allende was attempting in Chile.’
A conservative republican parliamentary deputy for Córdoba agreed. Federico FERNANDEZ DE CASTILLEJO, co-founder with Alcalá Zamora (who had been deposed as president of the republic after the Popular Front victory) of the right liberal republican party, DLR (Derecha Liberal Republicana), viewed the Popular Front programme as ‘extremely conservative’ and a clear expression of the electorate’s desire to prevent the republic’s enemies from taking over.
—There was no threat of a communist attempt to take power; the party was, apart from anything else, much too small. Indisputably, the working class and peasant masses put their class interests before other loyalties. This made it difficult, if not impossible, to convince them to ‘wait and put up with their hunger’ and not to make things difficult for a government which was trying to help them. All the more so when the proletariat knew from long experience that economic concessions could only be torn by force from the capitalists …
He had seen how, from the very first day of the republic, the reactionary oligarchy had used economic boycott, flight of capital, closure of factories, refusal to invest and to work the land as terrible weapons to bring down the regime. ‘And when the workers, especially in the infamous latifundist zones of Andalusia, invaded estates to get food or till the land, they were met sometimes with bullets, not bread. The republic defended private property, law and order.’
Only too well, thought Juan MARIN, a FAI building worker in Seville. But the Popular Front victory endangered the privileges of the ruling class, of capitalism itself.
—The people felt that socialist reforms would have to be made to solve the problems that the republic had proven it could not solve: the agrarian problem in particular. It was a pre-revolutionary situation …
Under constant pressure and threats of further mass land invasions (in fact, after the take-over of the 3,000 farms in Estremadura, there were no more), the government took over nearly 600,000 hectares of arable land and settled 100,000 landworkers in four months. Whether the agrarian problem was solved by a ‘democratic’ or a ‘socialist’ revolution was of academic interest to the rural bourgeoisie which stood to lose a great deal of land either way – if not, as many feared, their lives as well. Democracy had never been their solution; the latter would have to be sought in those forces prepared to put an end to the threat.
Agitation increased; strike after strike hit almost every industry and trade, culminating in the Madrid building strike which was still in progress at the start of the war. Street violence in Madrid, Seville and Málaga included inter-union assassinations of UGT and CNT militants.
On 1 May, Indalecio Prieto, the centrist socialist leader, warned the country that violence was paving the way for fascism and pointed to General Franco as the likely leader of a military uprising. On the same day mass demonstrations took place in cities throughout Spain.
SALAMANCA
—The marchers came down the street towards the town hall; at their head were about a hundred women wearing red scarves. One of them knew my friend, a tall, strong falangist who was standing next to me; he’d fucked her or something. She shook her fist in his face and shouted, ‘¡Viva Rusia, fascista!’ He shouted back at her: ‘¡Viva España, puta!’ The whole lot of them trampled over us until we had blood pouring from our noses and ears. All for crying, ‘Long live Spain!’ That had become a subversive shout …
Juan CRESPO, the monarchist student with falangist sympathies, nursed his wounds. ‘We all longed for the military to rise, longed for a dictatorship to put an end to this chaos. Not that we thought the army would … ’
MADRID
—We members of the workers’ and peasants’ anti-fascist militia marched at the head in our uniforms and leather belting, giving the clenched fist salute. The bourgeoisie, the aristocracy, watching from the balconies of their houses along the Castellana, got a good fright.
Our militia’s task was to defend the republic from the fascist attack everyone could see was coming, not to organize for revolution, maintained the communist youth clerk, Pedro SUAREZ, in line with his party’s strategy. In fact, had we tried to make the revolution there would have been a fine mess: the military would have simply risen even earlier. The post-election period was one of consolidating the democratic republic that had just been reconquered at the polls …
None the less, the new unified socialist youth, to which he belonged, had raised the slogans of a ‘workers’ government’, a ‘Red Army’ at the May Day demonstration which Largo Caballero’s paper Claridad described as a ‘great army of workers on its march to the summit close to power’. Caballero, the left-wing socialist leader, now dubbed the ‘Spanish Lenin’, called insistently for revolution, the dictatorship of the proletariat, telling the workers not to hold back their revolutionary actions for fear of a military coup. In June, he invited the left republicans in government to ‘leave their place to the working class’, and asked President Azaña to arm the workers. Not surprisingly, neither happened. In fact, the socialist party, by far and away the largest working-class party, was paralysed. Largo Caballero’s revolutionary postures, Prieto’s desire to re-establish the republican–socialist coalition of the first two years, Besteiro’s attacks on the ‘bolshevizers’, had torn the party open ideologically, tactically and even personally. The revolution the socialist left wing had been preaching for the past two years and more was, apparently, not to culminate in a seizure of power. The party remained firmly within the Popular Front policy.
ASTURIAS
From the time of the 1936 electoral victory, reflected a socialist miner, José MATA, veteran of the October revolutionary insurrection which held power in the mining villages for a fortnight, the working class was on the defensive.
—Waiting for the others to rise. I remember one of our union leaders, Antuña, saying that twenty-three out of the twenty-five garrisons were hostile to the republic. ‘You mean, you know they’re going to rise?’ I asked. ‘Yes … ’
But nothing had been done about it. The government sent Franco to the Canaries where he was closer to Morocco and the Army of Africa; and Mola to Pamplona where he could conspire amidst known opponents of the republic – the Carlists. It wasn’t the socialists’ fault, he thought: Prieto had warned the government several times. The blame lay with the petty bourgeois republicans.
Another veteran of the October rising, Alberto FERNANDEZ, a socialist baker, believed that his party had made a big mistake in leaving the government solely in the hands of the left republicans. Faced with the threat of fascism, the Popular Front policy was the correct one; the revolutionary phase of October 1934 was over. With socialist participation, the government might not have been able to prevent the uprising, ‘but might have been able to take the necessary precautions to snuff it out before it could spread’.
MADRID
The communist party insistently warned of the danger of a military coup. The whole thrust of its policies was to sustain the Popular Front with the petty bourgeoisie as the only effective anti-fascist alliance. The party had grown rapidly since the October insurrection which it had joined at the last minute and in which its militants had played a significant role. Unity in action with the other working-class organizations was bringing it an influence in working-class politics which a previous sectarian isolation had prevented. In the party’s view the need for unity between the working class and all ‘anti-fascist social classes and strata’ who were willing to seek a democratic solution to the country’s problems, meant that the anti-fascist alliance and the pursuit of the bourgeois democratic rev
olution were linked. But of the two there was no doubt which must take priority. Pressure from the masses, especially in the countryside, must be kept on the government to proceed with the revolution, but nothing must be allowed to jeopardize the Popular Front.
‘The struggle of democracy against fascism must come first,’ said José Diaz, the communist party’s secretary-general.
The dissident communist POUM, whose main strength was in Catalonia, believed in exactly the opposite policy. ‘The only anti-fascist struggle is the working-class revolutionary struggle to seize power and introduce socialism,’ wrote Andreu Nin, the POUM leader, at this time.
Wilebaldo SOLANO, twenty-year-old medical student soon to become secretary of the POUM’s youth movement, JCI (Juventud Comunista Ibérica), charted his party’s view of events from the Popular Front victory: the people had voted for the left because they saw the elections as one battle amongst many to come; they were prepared to vote one day and fight arms in hand the next. The masses were moving forward, the revolutionary process was given a new impetus by the electoral victory.
—And as it happened – you could almost plot it on a graph – as the masses advanced the socialist party and unified youth, under communist pressure, went backwards. Into the shelter of an exclusively Popular Front, petty bourgeois programme, leaving power in the hands of the left republicans …
But, as Nin recognized, in the absence of a mass revolutionary party and of organizations to ensure working-class unity in action, the moment was not ripe for the seizure of power.19 The pre-revolutionary situation had to be used to the maximum to create these necessary instruments.
Blood of Spain_An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War Page 12
