—It soon became evident that, since the big landowners’ estates weren’t going to provide enough land, medium-sized estates would have to be taken over also. But how could it be done? What I didn’t see, and nor did the republicans, was that agrarian reform without social revolution is impossible – if by reform we mean the modification of existing structures within the existing order. In a predominantly agrarian country, agrarian property – the country’s wealth – is in the hands of the rich; those who hold power through their ownership of land are not simply going to give it up. Property in an overwhelmingly rural country – 45 per cent of the working population earned its living from the land, some 60 per cent of the total population lived in the countryside – cannot be expropriated by democratic means; it has to be done by violence. In saying that, I am not condoning violence. I’m simply saying that agrarian reform by democratic legislation is impossible. Agrarian reform comes as a result of revolution, not vice versa. And once the revolution has been made, the problem of agrarian reform is solved, since the landowners, as enemies of the new regime, are automatically expropriated …
In any event, the law was never applied because, as the result of a series of a political compromises, it contained internal contradictions which, in his view, prevented it from being applied. The major contradiction was that the law attempted to reconcile the reform to the existing legal structure: each owner was given the legal right to show why his land should not be expropriated. Every estate required its own proceedings, its own dossier. ‘The only lands taken over were grandee lands or those voluntarily offered.’
The parcelling out of land did not necessarily satisfy the poor peasantry.6 In one of the southern Toledo villages, Navalmorales de Pusa, Timoteo RUIZ’s father, a smallholder, received two plots.
—The land was so poor that when we calculated how much work we would have to put into it for the small return we would get, we realized we were wasting our time. A lot of the landless and smallholders came to the same conclusion and left the land idle. Without tools, seed or credit, agrarian reform was useless. Moreover, it did nothing to take the land from the big, non-grandee owners …
Because of a clause which would have expropriated all lands within 2 km of a village not directly cultivated by owners who held more than 20 hectares of grainland in the municipality, more medium and small owners were potentially affected by the reform (when, later, it would be applied to the rest of Spain) than large bourgeois owners. The latter thus found allies in their struggle against the reform. Faced with losing land for compensation which at best would give them only two thirds its market value,7 the large bourgeois owners had no interest in paying the cost of consolidating liberal democracy, a political system they had not favoured in the past. Other questions, especially the religious problem, compounded their hostility. Both were attacks on the holders of economic power. Inevitably, as Ernesto CASTAÑO, lawyer and prime mover in mobilizing Catholic agrarian reaction in Salamanca, saw, the defence of one involved the defence of the other.
—The socialist agrarian reform terrified the landowners. Their lands were going to be taken from them – with or without compensation. As soon as the republic was proclaimed, subversive, demagogic propaganda got a ready hearing amongst agricultural labourers. In many villages they were saying, ‘The sickles this year aren’t going to reap wheat but the farmers’ heads’ …
He helped found the Salamanca Agrarian Bloc which, while declaring its allegiance to the republic, called for the end of class struggle in the countryside, ‘the harmony of capital and labour’, being convinced that the interests of both on the land were the same. The solution to the land problem was not the redistribution of land but a change in the structures of existing agriculture, a revaluation of its price levels, its consideration by the government as of equal importance to industry and commerce.
The Agrarian Bloc was one of the original nuclei of what was to become the mass Catholic CEDA, although it retained its own identity within it; Gil Robles, the CEDA leader, was a deputy for Salamanca and was supported by the Bloc from the beginning. CASTAÑO, who was elected to parliament for the CEDA in 1933, had gone to gaol the previous year for inciting farmers not to sow land to wheat ‘except on the most productive soil, for elsewhere it was entirely uneconomic, given the government’s wheat price.’ This was seen by the republican government as a landowners’ and farmers’ boycott.
—The republic needed class war. It made worker fight employer, labourer and tenant fight landowner. And it provided justifications. The right for tenants to have their rents revised, the right for any worker in a given municipality to get agricultural work ahead of a man from outside. It meant that a farmer had to hire an incompetent local labourer, even a non-agricultural worker, before he could take a competent man from outside.8 If, instead of taking measures like these, the government had reformed the structures of agriculture, the working class would have benefited from the increased profits to be made from farming. Landless labourers were not professionally or psychologically suited to become farmers; they had lived too close to the problems, knew a farmer had to work harder than they as labourers, didn’t want his headaches. A farmer has to be born a farmer …
In scores of villages across the land, the change of regime had changed the names of the political parties but little else. There was no change in the local power structure when a former monarchist cacique became the local leader (or behind-the-scenes manipulator) of a newly formed republican party. Fulgencio DIEZ PASTOR, a radical deputy on the parliamentary agricultural commission in 1933, who came from an Estremaduran village, knew the problem intimately. In each village there would be two or three men who were relatively rich ‘given the general poverty that then existed’. They were men whose ownership of some olive groves or pasture land meant that they did not have to work with their hands; they were the caciques, the people who ruled the villagers’ lives. It was this class which sabotaged the republican regime.
—Not only by their resistance, but by their cleverness – however crude – in being able to infiltrate political parties at the local level. More often than not it would be the same man who organized the different local parties, putting his followers into the committees to run them. It happened in my own party, it happened in the CEDA. It completely falsified the political situation9 …
From their vantage point, as he saw, the rural bourgeoisie fought all reform. Had an attempt been made to expropriate them – as indeed was required under the agrarian reform – it would have had only one effect: ‘to bring forward the date of the civil war. For that, at heart, was what the uprising was about: the defence of their property’.
The rural bourgeoisie’s hostility to reform was shared by the one capitalist sector which stood to gain most in the long run: the industrial bourgeoisie. The fact that in large part the world depression was initially palliated for the Catalan textile industry by an increase in rural purchasing power (thanks to socialist-decreed rural wage increases) did not evidently outweigh the disadvantages for the Catalan bourgeoisie of breaking its political alliance with Spain’s landowning class. (Had the latter been a ‘feudal’ nobility, rather than a rural bourgeoisie, the alliance might have been less tenable.) The most ‘politically advanced’ capitalist sector in the peninsula went even further: it prevented a capitalist agrarian reform in its own homeland. The Llei de contractes de conreu, passed by the petty bourgeois Esquerra party, attempted to resolve a long-standing peasant dispute by guaranteeing tenant farmers (rabassaires) security of tenure and the right to purchase land they had been working for eighteen years. The Lliga Catalana, representing the big bourgeois industrial and agrarian interests, succeeded in having the law overturned as unconstitutional. Paradoxically, it was agrarian reform in industrialized Catalonia (rather than in the latifundist south) which precipitated the greatest political conflict in this area: the blockage of its reform led the Esquerra to clash with – and eventually to rise against – the central government in Octobe
r 1934.10
The CEDA (whose participation in the government was the immediate cause of the October insurrection) revealed the depths of the rural bourgeoisie’s opposition to any reform. The CEDA’s parliamentary membership blocked its own agriculture minister’s attempt to restart agrarian reform and, in particular, a proposed new lease law which would give tenants the right to purchase their land after twelve years of uninterrupted leasing. Gil Robles, the CEDA leader, was later to call such blocking action ‘suicidal egoism’; CEDA members at the time labelled their minister a ‘white Bolshevik’.
Thus even the most modest changes were blocked. The bourgeois opposition was matched by a part of the agricultural proletariat’s refusal to accept agrarian reform. At both its extraordinary congresses under the republic, the CNT came out in opposition to it. In 1931, it stated that the anarcho-syndicalists’ task was not to collaborate in land reform but to prepare for the day when the rural masses, in collaboration with the proletariat, would overthrow capitalism and seize the land. Five years later, at the Saragossa congress, a more defensive tone crept into its warning about reform. This was no doubt as a result of the recent large-scale seizure of land by the socialist Landworkers’ Federation and the speed-up of agrarian reform under rural pressures after the Popular Front electoral victory. Agrarian reform, the CNT then admitted, presented the anarcho-syndicalist movement with ‘a serious problem, namely how not to lose control of the peasant masses’. It then went on to call for the expropriation without compensation of all property over 50 hectares in extent, and the handing over of the land to peasants’ unions for their direct and collective exploitation.11
Where good arable land was taken over, the new settlers found themselves considerably better off but also facing problems. The duke of Medinaceli, the largest noble landowner in Spain with 79,000 hectares, owned three estates covering just under 3,000 hectares near Espejo on the road from Córdoba to Castro del Río. The smallest of these, La Reina, about 650 hectares, was handed over to the inhabitants of Santa Cruz, a near-by hamlet. Felipe POSADAS, son of a sharecropper and renter in the place, who received no land because he tilled more than the necessary minimum, remembered the moment when the news was announced.
—What joy there was in Santa Cruz that day! Soon sixty-two settlers were in occupation on the cortijo. I was very interested in agrarian reform, convinced that the only solution was to work the land collectively, and I often went to La Reina to see how things were going …
The agrarian reform institute, IRA (Instituto de Reforma Agraria), decided that the estate should be worked collectively because it was late in the year and the ploughing and sowing had to be got under way rapidly. The IRA delegate selected and bought sixty-two mules from the 400 or more that were brought to the cortijo by dealers. The labradores (large tenant farmers) who had lost their rented farms were paid compensation for the livestock, straw and crops. ‘One of them made enough to put down a part-payment on the purchase of a 350-hectare farm.’ The settlers drew their mules by lot and the price was set down against each. It would have to be paid back to the IRA in due course. To every two settlers the IRA gave a yoke, a plough and a threshing board. Each settler could choose his ploughing team-mate which usually ended up as a family affair between relatives.
—Some of the settlers were happy because they had worked with their mules in the past. But others weren’t. Then the ploughing started. Many of the settlers began to say that others’ mules were being worked less hard than their own, and that there was favouritism. I went to the estate one day; there was an hour to go before the work day ended. Twenty-five teams were ploughing – if you could call it that. Each was running almost in the furrow of the plough ahead. The mistake, of course, was to have allocated the mules individually and then expect them to work in common …
While the land was being worked collectively, each settler got a day-wage from the IRA as an advance on his share of the harvest. Each had been allocated a plot of land which varied slightly in size depending on the quality of the soil. Soon there were complaints that the two cabezaleros – foremen or managers of the collectives whom the settlers had elected – weren’t working like the rest of the men.
—The complaints were ridiculous. The cabezalero worked when he could, but he had to attend to the other duties for which he had been elected: keeping the accounts, reporting to the IRA agronomists who came out once or twice weekly from Córdoba, etc. Moreover, if the settlers didn’t like them they could elect other managers. Instead they preferred to grumble. The trouble was that everyone wanted to be a boss …
This, the following year, the settlers proceeded to institutionalize; they decided to work their plots individually and the IRA agreed. The settlers now did not get a day-wage. Some had better land than others, some, because of the fallow system, would not be able to sow wheat that year. Others had land which would never support wheat, only barley at the best …
—The fact is they were all worse off. Even more ridiculous was the fact that specialists in different agricultural jobs – sowing, livestock, etc. – were now having to do everything on their own plot. ‘If you worked in common, each doing what he knows best how to do, you’d all be better off,’ I used to say; but there was no convincing them, not in this village at least …
La Reina was the only one of the three estates, as POSADAS remembered, which was worked entirely individually. On another, individualists and collectivists co-existed, and on the third, which had been made over to the village of Espejo, it was entirely collective.12
—There was little awareness here, in truth. Espejo was much bigger, it had its socialist and anarcho-syndicalist organizations. In my village, with its 900 inhabitants, there was only a socialist centre as I remember, but it wasn’t of much importance. Remember the lack of education, the backwardness that existed in the countryside then. For all that, and even if La Reina was the worst off of the three, the settlers were a lot better off than they had been. Their houses – if you can call them that, they were shacks really – were bursting with wheat: 1934 was a magnificent year. Some managed to make enough to buy their house and even a bit of land; and that after paying off their share to the IRA for wages, tools, seed-corn, mules …
*
Fear of rural unrest pushed the first republican coalition to take action on agrarian reform; when that unrest failed to materialize (or rather built up much more slowly than anticipated), the coalition allowed matters to drag. ‘Moderate, defensive-type working-class pressure (even in industry), active employers’ resistance, and an uncertain economic conjuncture, explain without doubt the governing coalition’s relative disinterest in the agrarian problem.’13 After two and a half years under left and centre-right republican governments, only 45,000 hectares had changed hands to the benefit of some 6,000–7,000 peasants.
The Popular Front electoral pact promised fiscal and financial help for the smallholding peasantry and renters, whom it considered ‘the firmest base’ of the necessary national reconstruction, and a new lease law. Hitherto, agrarian reform had done nothing to help the smallholding peasantry: a national agrarian bank, a lease law, redemption rights had been promised under the first coalition government but had never seen the light of day. Thus the 1936 electoral pact attempted to remedy the situation. But as to the urgent problem of the landless, it had virtually nothing to say (see section E).
Within four months of the Popular Front victory, under massive peasant pressure, over 100,000 landworkers were settled on nearly 600,000 hectares. No one, landowner or worker, could be unaware of the difference. The left republican agriculture minister, Mariano Ruiz-Funes, underlined the point in a speech a month before the uprising: ‘A class struggle is being waged through agrarian reform … ’14
* * *
No por mucho madrugar
Amanece mas temprano,
En España no hay quién sea
Católico y repúblicano
Arise as early as you wish
The dawn w
ill break no earlier,
In Spain no one can be
Catholic and republican
Si los curas y frailes supieran
La paliza que les van a dar,
Suberían al coro cantando
Libertad, libertad, libertad
If the priests and the friars knew
The beating they’re going to get,
They’d go to the choir stalls singing,
Liberty, liberty, liberty
Sung to the tune of the republican national anthem, Himno de Riego
* * *
Yo tenía una bandera,
Hecha de sangre y de sol
Me dicen que no la quiera
Yo ya no soy español
I had a flag
The colour of blood and sun
They tell me I no longer love it
So I am a Spaniard no more
Reference to the red and gold flag of Spain introduced in the eighteenth century and substituted under the republic by a red, gold and mauve flag
* * *
B. The petty bourgeoisie and the religious question
The urban and provincial petty bourgeoisie – artisans, medium-sized peasantry, shopkeepers, civil servants, small industrialists, professionals – numbered in the 1930s perhaps some 1,300,000 (compared to an urban and rural proletariat of over 3 million). Excluding the north-eastern Mediterranean and sections of the northern Atlantic seaboards, the provincial petty bourgeoisie15 had shown no particular predilection for the republic before its advent.
But it was to develop a considerable ‘negative’ political weight under the republic, withdrawing direct support from, withholding outright opposition to, the liberal republican regime. It formed the electoral support of the conservative republican parties, especially the CEDA from 1933 on, as long as these offered hope of protecting the interests and social positions it had occupied under the monarchy. These interests were, above all, local. The retention of power at the level of township and village was of equal, if not greater, import than national government, which was, moreover, ‘centralist’. The provincial bourgeoisie displayed considerable skill in maintaining its local positions despite the change of regime. (See also section A.)
Blood of Spain_An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War Page 80
