Looking back after 70 years…

Monday August 07, 2006 11:18

by By Tom Wetzel

Workers Power and the Spanish Revolution - Part 1

A really well documented essay about the workers power during the Spanish Revolution 1936-1939 by long time anarchosyndicalist activist Tom Wetzel.

In Spain’s national elections in Febru¬ary of 1936, a repressive right-wing government was swept out of office and replaced by a coalition of liberals and socialists. Taking advantage of a less repressive environment, Spain’s work¬ers propelled the largest strike wave in Spanish history, with dozens of citywide general strikes and hun¬dreds of partial strikes. By the end of June a million workers were out on strike.

Barely a month after the election, the Land Workers Federation led 80,000 land¬less laborers into a seizure of three thousand farms in the “Spanish Sibe¬ria” — the poverty-stricken region of Estremadura(1). With the country at a high pitch of debate over its future, political polarization was punctuated by tit-for-tat killings of Right and Left activists. With right-wing politicians openly calling for an army takeover, the widely anticipated army coup began in Spain on July 19th.

For the first time in Spanish history, the people aggressively resisted an army takeover attempt. The coup was defeated in two-thirds of the country. The unions moved to confiscate vast amounts of capitalist assets, putting most of Spain’s economy under worker management. Unions built their own revolutionary labor army to fight the Spanish military. The military’s attempt to crush the country’s labor movement propelled the working-class revolution that the Spanish elite had long feared. The civil war itself was class conflict in its most extreme form.

Two of the key players in this drama were the country’s main labor federations. The National Confederation of Labor (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo — CNT) had 1.6 millbers in early 1936 (according to government statistics). The CNT was the product of nearly seven decades of anarchist labor organizing in Spain. Since 1919 the CNT had been based on the sindi¬cato unico (“single union”) — auton¬omous local industrial unions. In Barcelona in 1936 the CNT construction and met¬allurgical sindicatos unicos each had more than 30,000 members.

No sindicato unico in the CNT had any paid officials. Workers liked the anarchist idea that the common struggle should not become an avenue of personal careerism. Anarchists believed that paid officials encouraged workers to look to those leaders to solve their problems, and led to domination of unions by chiefs. In 1936 there were only a few paid officials in the CNT federation — the national secretary, the regional secretary of Catalonia, and the secretary of the national industrial union in the commercial fishing industry. These officials, and the staff of the CNT daily newspapers in Madrid and Barcelona, were paid an average worker’s wage. Paid officials were also rotated from office after one year.

While organizing struggles around immediate concerns, anarchists in the CNT also encouraged discussion of vision for a society beyond capitalism, without structures of oppression and exploitation. The CNT’s “apoliticism” meant that it opposed an electoral or parliamentary strategy for social change. The aim of CNT militants was the liberation of the working class from class oppression through mass action by the workers themselves.

Each sindicato unico had “sections” that had their own assem¬blies and elected shop stewards (dele¬gados). In manufacturing industries like textile or metalworking, there was a “section” for each firm or plant. In the construction industry, the “sections” corresponded to the various crafts. All of the autonomous industrial unions in a city or county (comarca) were grouped together into a local labor council (federación local). The unions were part of a larger context of movement institutions. The libertarian Left in Spain also organized alternative schools and an extensive network of ateneos — storefront community centers. The ateneos were centers for debates, cultural events, literacy classes (between 30 and 50 percent of the population was illiterate in the ‘30s), and so on. A characteristic idea of Spanish anarchism was the preparation of ordinary people for effective participation in the struggle for social transformation.

The libertarian syndicalism of the CNT was a form of “prefigurative” politics. In developing a union based on participa¬tion in decision-making through the assemblies and unpaid, elected delega¬dos, CNT militants believed they were trying to prac¬tice a form of organization that was a foretaste of a society where workers ran industry and the society was self-managed through the participa¬tory democracy of assemblies.

The second major labor organization in Spain was the General Union of Work¬ers (Union General de Trabajadores — UGT), with 1.4 million members in early 1936. The UGT was aligned with the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (Partido Socialista Obrero Español — PSOE) although the Communist Party was also active within it. The UGT was the majority union organization in the Castillian central regions of Spain, including Madrid, and in the coal-mining region of Asturias on the north Atlantic coast. The UGT Land Workers Federation (Federación Nacional de Trabajadores de la Tierra — FNTT) had a half million members in the spring of 1936. With its campaign for agrar¬ian reform through land seizures, the FNTT was a mass revolutionary move¬ment in the countryside.

The Boom and the Death Squads

The mass mobilizations and the social polarization leading up to the civil war were the culmination of a social crisis that had been brewing in Spain for decades. The crisis began to manifest itself during the World War I era. Spain was neutral during the war and was able to trade with both sides. A massive industrialization and urbanization boom got underway in Catalonia. This would continue during the world boom of the 1920s. Barcelona was the fastest growing city in western Europe in this period. Industrial suburbs grew up rapidly around new factories. Barce¬lona had been a major trading center on the Mediterranean since the middle ages, and was home to an entrepreneurial business class.

The economic boom of the World War I years also led to growth for Spain’s two major labor organizations. The Russian revolution of February 1917 also encouraged a growing radical trend. The high point of labor struggle during the war was a national general strike in 1917, supported by the UGT and CNT. In Barcelona the CNT were masters of the city until the army moved in to suppress the strike. (Victor Serge’s novel Birth of Our Power is an impressionistic account of the 1917 Barcelona general strike.)

To deal with the growing threat of the CNT in Catalonia, the head of the police, Severiano Martinez Anido, began recruiting gunmen to assassinate CNT officials and activists, with the assistance of the police. Employers and officials of the Roman Catholic Church provided funding for the death squads. During this period there were 440 attempted murders of workers in Catalonia(2). Workers were being forced to join “yellow” trade unions, the Sindicatos Libres (“Free Unions”), at the point of a gun. A small core of religious, Carlist skilled workers had formed the Sindicatos Libres. Carlism was a form of right-wing Catholic politics in Spain. In response, some young anarchists formed armed action groups, which retaliated by assassinating employers and church leaders who were believed to be funding the death squads.

For years Spain had been trying to hold onto its last scrap of empire in Morocco. In 1923 a military campaign in Morocco, promoted by King Alfonso, led to a disaster in which 10,000 Spanish soldiers were killed. The army clamped a dictatorship on Spain, headed by General Miguel Primo de Rivera, partly as a means to suppress outrage over this incident. The CNT was banned throughout the country. Primo de Rivera introduced a scheme of incorporating the unions into the state via Arbitration Boards; he encouraged participation by the UGT as a “responsible” alternative to the CNT. The Catholic “Free Unions,” preaching the harmony of labor and capital and a form of proletarian clerical-fascism, competed with the UGT for representation on the Arbitration Boards. With state and employer backing, the Free Unions had formed a national organization by 1925 (Federación Nacional de Sindicatos Libres — FNSL) with 200,000 members(3), nearly as large as the UGT.

Mass Rent Strike

In 1930 the king fled the country as the dictatorship collapsed. Elections brought a coalition of liberals and socialists to power, to govern the new Republic. The CNT unions regained the legal right to organize. Faced with growing unemployment, and a desire to rebuild their organization, the CNT sindicato unico of construction workers in Barcelona began a campaign of invading construction sites to sign up members and to demand that contractors hire 15 percent more workers. The construction union argued that the housing sector in Catalonia had made super-profits during the boom of the ‘20s — profits that were tied down in unproductive investments. Increasing the number of people employed by the industry would put more money into circulation, helping to counter the depression. With workers pouring into the CNT sindicato unico, the Catholic FNSL construction craft unions collapsed.

In the late ‘20s a broad debate had begun in the CNT about the union’s future direction. One aspect of this debate was the proposal to group local unions into national industry unions for coordinated action against employers in an industry throughout the country. Joan Peiró — a self-educated glass worker and an influential syndicalist theoretician — was able to persuade a CNT congress to allow national industry unions in 1931. However, some anarchists opposed this proposal on the grounds that it could lead to the development of a new bureaucracy of paid officials beyond the control of the local unions. Due to this opposition, national industrial unions were created in only a few industries in the CNT before 1936. A national industrial union was created among workers at the Spanish National Telephone Co. In 1931 the CNT launched a nation-wide strike against the phone company. This was an initiation into union struggle for the largely female workforce of telephone operators.

Another aspect of the debate in the CNT was how to break out of the box of industrial struggles that focus only on issues of wages and working conditions. There was a feeling that the CNT needed to extend its influence beyond a purely labor context to other areas of society. Joan Peiró argued for the formation of neighborhood-based committees to organize around broad issues of concern to the working class, not just work-related questions.

During the boom of the ‘20s, rents had risen by 150 percent in Barcelona. Crowding, construction of shanties by unscrupulous landlords and housing without basic amenities like running water had become common. In early 1931 activists in the CNT began to discuss the possibility of a struggle around rents, and articles about the housing crisis began appearing in the big daily paper operated by the CNT in Barcelona, Solidaridad Obrera.

The rent struggle began with a mass meeting of the CNT construction union in April 1931. At that meeting Arturo Parera and Santiago Bilbao proposed the formation of an Economic Defense Commission, with the participation of other unions. Parera and Bilbao were both prominent members of the Iberian Anarchist Federation (Federación Anarquista Iberica — FAI). The FAI was a loose amalgam of anarchist groups that worked mainly as caucuses within the CNT unions.

After a series of neighborhood meetings, the rent campaign settled on a demand for a 40 percent rent rollback at a mass meeting at the Palace of Fine Arts on July 5th. The meeting decided that the rent deposits paid by tenants should be used to pay the next month’s rent and after that renters would refuse to pay rent if their landlord didn’t agree to the rent reduction. The Chamber of Urban Property — the landlords’ organization — denounced the campaign as a criminal violation of their rights. They demanded police action to suppress the rent campaign. By the end of August, the Economic Defense Commission claimed that 100,000 people were not paying their rent.

The ability of the rent struggle to reach out beyond the existing CNT union members was illustrated by the large numbers of women who were active in the struggle. On one occasion a group of asaltos (Assault Guards — a paramilitary national police force created by Republican politicians in the early ‘30s) sent to evict a tenant backed down when confronted by a large crowd of women and children. Because the city employees charged with carrying out evictions were either intimidated by the crowds or were sympathetic to the rent strike, the landlords began recruiting their own militia to carry out evictions.

The landlords’ organization appealed to the national government to take action to suppress the strike. Largo Caballero, the UGT executive secretary and a leader of the PSOE, was a member of the cabinet in the liberal/socialist coalition government. Caballero was unsympathetic to the rent strike, calling it “absurd.” At the same time, Caballero’s UGT was providing scabs to break the CNT telephone strike in Madrid. In the midst of the rent strike in Barcelona, a large explosion went off. No one was injured, but there was severe damage to telephone equipment. Even though there was no connection to the rent strike, the government used this as a pretext to ban meetings of the Economic Defense Commission. The government also banned meetings of the CNT telephone union.

The national government appointed a conservative lawyer as civil governor for Catalonia and he announced that he would simply not allow the rent strike to continue. The authorities began using preventive detention to hold Santiago Bilbao and 52 other CNT activists. Preventive detention meant that a person could be held indefinitely without any charges being filed. This had been one of the hated methods of the military dictatorship. People had thought that these methods would become a thing of the past under the new Republic. Eventually, police were able to suppress the rent strike by arresting tenants who had been put back into apartments by their neighbors after an eviction. Nonetheless, in many areas of the city individual landlords had entered into rent reduction deals with their tenants. Many tenants thus felt they had won something. For a younger generation of CNT activists, this was the first time they had been involved in a large-scale direct action campaign. For working class participants it was a direct lesson in the way a broad range of groups, from landlords to police to politicians, were aligned against them(4).

The Land and the Church

Spain in the ‘30s was a country with very uneven economic development. Wealthy, industrialized Catalonia might look like developed areas in other western European countries, but other areas of Spain were rather different. Spain was still a predominantly agrarian country, with 45.5 percent of the “economically active” population engaged in agriculture. In an agrarian country a large part of the wealth is tied up in land ownership. South of the Guadarrama mountains was the latifundia zone, the region that had been conquered from the Moors by a Castilian army in the middle ages. Capitalist investors bought up latifundias — huge estates — after feudal restrictions on sale of land were broken in the 19th century. In this region two thousand families owned 90 percent of the land. Meanwhile, 750,000 landless laborers were employed at starvation wages.

North of the Guadarramas were areas where campesinos owned small- to medium-sized farms. In some areas of the north, the plots were often too small to support a family. The campesinos often had to hire themselves out for wages, or work as sharecroppers. The mass social base of the far-right political parties were the religious, land-owning farmers in areas of the north like Old Castile and Navarre, and the religious middle strata — small business owners, lawyers, officials, etc. — of the provincial towns. In the big cities and along the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts these middle classes were the social base of the liberal Republican parties.

The elite classes in Spain regarded the Spanish Roman Catholic Church as an essential ideological prop of the social order. But the church was widely hated in working class circles for preaching the acceptance of poverty while amassing vast assets and catering to the more affluent sectors of society. In 1930 there were more clergy in Spain than in any country other than Italy. There were 35,000 priests and 80,000 monks and nuns. Yet regular attendance at mass was not very high. South of the Guadarramas, it was as low as 5 percent of the population(5). Church opposition to science meant that many teachers and doctors were anti-clerical. Anti-clericalism was widespread among the Spanish Left, from working class anarchists to middle-class liberal Republicans.

The first liberal/socialist Republican government in 1931 attacked the power of the church by disallowing any church role in education other than religious instruction. The powerful Jesuit order was dissolved. Civil marriage and divorce were established. Uprisings and Factional Struggles The liberal/socialist coalition also engaged in various acts of repression directed against CNT unions. Caballero was willing to take advantage of these measures to build the UGT union at the expense of the CNT. In this repressive environment, which forced the CNT into direct confrontations with the authorities, a number of anarchist groups in the CNT pushed the union into attempted revolutionary general strikes and insurrectionary adventures. In a typical scenario, a group of anarchists would seize the local town hall, run up the red and black flag, burn property records and declare “libertarian communism” in the town. Advocates of these methods called this “revolutionary gymnastics.” These attempted insurrections were a throwback to the 19th century anarchist concept of “propaganda by the deed” — the idea that an exemplary action by a small group of revolutionaries can spark off a spontaneous popular uprising. In the most infamous of these attempts — a failed national general strike in January 1933 — paramilitary asaltos carried out a massacre in the village of Casas Viejas in Andalusia. A whole family was burned in their hut and the police shot people who had surrendered.

The worst fears of many syndicalists were realized in the January 1933 uprising: “the national confederation and the regionals [were] manipulated by a small group of militants who had committed the entire membership to precipitous and dangerous action,” writes Jerome Mintz. “The membership had been badly mauled in street fighting, the leaders arrested and beaten, and the [unions] closed.”(6) In the syndicalist view, social transformation required the prior organization and education of the working class, the development of its skills and self-confidence, and working out a coherent revolutionary strategy, not a reliance on pure “spontaneity.” Joan Peiró, in his 1933 book Sindicalismo, put it this way: “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. 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.”(7) “Continuity” would be assured by the fact that the social transformation is carried out by the workers themselves, who have the skills to continue the running of industry.

The factional struggle inside the CNT in the early ‘30s became quite heated after a group of thirty union officials and activists sent to the capitalist press a document criticizing an alleged “dictatorship” over the CNT by the FAI. These thirty activists and their followers became known as the treintista (“thirty-ist”) tendency. It wasn’t only the treintistas who opposed the insurrectionary adventures being propelled by FAI groups in Catalonia. FAI groups outside Catalonia were also critical.

With the advent of the Republic, one of the leading treintistas — Angel Pestaña — began advocating the formation of a labor political party, and soon established the Unionist Party (Partido Sindicalista) to compete in parliamentary elections. Although most treintistas did not follow Pestaña into electoral politics, various anarchists worried that this was the direction the treintistas were headed.

FAI groups in Catalonia were also worried about a Leninist group organizing in the CNT unions. In 1930 the Workers Federation of Catalonia and the Balearic Islands had merged with the majority from the Catalan Communist Party (Partit Comunista Catala — PCC) to form the Workers and Peasants Bloc (Bloc Obrer i Camperol — BOC). The BOC was an anti-Stalinist group that identified, nonetheless, with the Leninist model of a “vanguard party.” The BOC was especially strong in Lleida. A leading figure in the CNT in Lleida was Joaquin Maurin, a popular teacher. Maurin was the leader of the BOC.

The BOC also tried to gain control of libertarian ateneos in Catalonia. The main decision-making body in an ateneo would be the periodic assemblies that elected the administrative committee of the ateneo. The BOC would show up in force to these assemblies to gain control of the administrative committee.

By 1932 the FAI had gained sufficient hegemony in the CNT that it was able to get the treintista- and BOC-dominated unions expelled. As a result, the CNT lost most of its union organization in Lleida. In 1934 the BOC-controlled unions formed a new labor federation, the Workers Federation of Union Unity (Federación Obrera de Unidad Sindical — FOUS). In 1935 the BOC merged with a smaller Leninist group and changed its name to Workers Party of Marxist Unification (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista — POUM)(8).

In 1933 right-wing parties won the elections, and Spain entered a period of repressive government, known as the biennio negro (“two black years”). At this time Largo Caballero and much of the Socialist Party began to move to the left. Caballero began talking about the need for “proletarian revolution” and “a workers’ government.” A number of events led to the PSOE’s turn to the left: the rise to power of Hitler in Germany and of the clerical-fascist Christian Social Party in Austria, rising unemployment, the popular outrage at the Casas Viejas massacre, and the intransigence of Spanish employers. The small amounts of money made available to provide land for landless laborers by the government were totally inadequate to deal with the magnitude of land reform needed. There was very little to show from the PSOE’s coalition with the liberal Republicans in 1931-33.

One sign of the Socialist move to the left was an attempt at a national general strike in October 1934. Relations with the CNT were still not patched up and poor coordination doomed the strike in most of Spain. The situation was different in Asturias where the UGT and CNT had worked for some months to develop a “Workers Alliance.” Thus in October the two unions seized control of the region for two weeks, in a joint uprising. But they were isolated. When the army was sent in to crush the rebellion, thousands were killed and many thousands sent to prison. Wives and daughters of the rebels were raped and mutilated by the Foreign Legion — an army unit made up of thugs and criminals from various countries. The uprising frightened the elite classes while the violent repression alienated the working class.

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Looking back after 70 yeras cont.

by Tom Wetzel

Mon Aug 07, 2006 11:21

Left-Libertarian Vision

By early 1936 the membership of the UGT and CNT union organizations were at an all-time high. With the country gripped by intense debate about its future, a wave of strikes spread throughout the country, included numerous community-wide general strikes. With the victory of the liberal/socialist coalition in the elections in February, workers could anticipate a breathing space in which to organize strikes and press for change. The farm worker unions were carrying out their land reform through mass land seizures. The treintista theoretician Joan Peiró told a journalist in May: “The masses are moving towards revolution.” With right-wing activists calling for the army to take power, many people were anticipating a military coup d’etat. In the midst of this atmosphere of mobilization and crisis, the CNT held a national congress at Zaragoza. By 1935 the Catalan anarchist groups had moved away from their earlier insurrectionary phase and towards reconciliation with the treintistas. To have the maximum unity for the battles ahead, the FAIstas invited the treintistas back into the CNT.

Among the issues taken up at the congress was the CNT’s vision for what kind of society it wanted to create, which it called “libertarian communism.” The vision document adopted by the Zaragoza congress attempted to synthesize the communalist anarchist and libertarian syndicalist influences on Spanish Left-libertarian thinking about post-capitalist society.

A dual structure of governance for the society was envisioned, based on both workplace assemblies and assemblies of residents in villages or neighborhoods. The workplace assemblies would elect workplace councils and be linked into national industrial federations, to manage the various industries.

Strong emphasis was placed on the “free municipality” and its autonomy, reflecting the communalist anarchist influence. This would be an institution rooted in assemblies of the residents in villages or urban neighborhoods. In a large city, such as Barcelona, the assemblies would elect the Municipal Council. The members of the council would continue to work a regular job in social production, and important issues would be referred back to the base assemblies for decision.

In the version of social planning that had been proposed by Diego Abad de Santillan(9), the various self-managing national industrial federations would be linked into an Economics Council, as a coordinating body. But the actual plans were to be developed by regional and national congresses of delegates from the industrial federations, with the help of support staff. This is, in effect, a democratic, syndicalist version of central planning.

The Zaragoza congress vision document differs from Abad de Santillan’s proposal by adding the structure of residential assemblies and geographic federations of these as the _expression of political self-rule but also as the channel for consumer input, with responsibility for articulating proposals for public goods such as health care, media, town beautification, and housing. But how exactly would consumer input be plugged into the system of social planning? In fact the Zaragoza document doesn’t say. Traditional anarchism lacked a concept of participatory planning — interactive development of a social plan through consumer/worker negotiation(10).

The Zaragoza document provided for the linking of the free municipalities into regional and national People’s Congresses. In effect, this provided for local, regional and national legislatures. The document also envisions a “People’s Militia” — in other words, an army — as a means of defense of the new social order (11). A structure that can make rules for a society and defend its rule-making authority with military force is in fact a polity, a form of government. If a Left-libertarian polity isn’t a state, then a distinction is needed between a polity (or structure of governance) and a state. Traditional anarchist writing on this subject was not very clear.

Peter Kropotkin’s attempt to make this distinction leads towards the emphasis on local autonomy and decentralization characteristic of Spanish communalist anarchism: Because “the State was established for the precise purpose of imposing the rule of” dominating classes, a move towards socialization of the economy and “liberating labor” requires “a new form of political organization” that is “more popular, more decentralized, and nearer to the folk-mote self-government” than “representative government,” the type of state characteristic of capitalism, according to Kropotkin(12). Although the Zaragoza congress endorsed a proposal for a “revolutionary workers’ alliance” with the UGT union federation, the congress failed to discuss actual strategy or a program for the immediate situation that the CNT faced. As a result, the CNT would be forced to “improvise in total incoherence”(13) two months later, in the aftermath of the military coup d’etat.

Coup

The army takeover began in Spain in the early morning hours of July 19th. At 5 AM factory sirens began going off in Barcelona. The CNT had arranged the sirens as a signal to its defense organization that the army was moving out of its bases. The CNT had organized about 200 neighborhood defense groups throughout the Barcelona area, with about two thousand armed activists, and had set up a regional workers defense committee to coordinate them. The night before the coup they had seized a cache of arms from a ship in Barcelona harbor.

When the CNT concentrated its forces at one of the army bases in the morning, an army corporal shot his fascist officer and persuaded his fellow soldiers to surrender. Thus the CNT gained access to a large supply of arms. Employees of the streetcar company seized the armored car used by the company for the movement of cash and used it as an armored vehicle in the fight. Once the CNT had gone into action against the army, rank-and-file asaltos joined the fight. In Barceloneta, a working class neighborhood around the docks, a police major began handing out weapons to anyone who could show a union card. Pilots of the Spanish air force began bombing and strafing positions of the army around Barcelona.

Nowhere in Spain did rank-and-file members of the police take the initiative to fight the army on their own. Where workers failed to take aggressive, armed action and trusted to liberal government officials, the police played a waiting game. In the CNT stronghold of Zaragoza, in Aragon, a local CNT leader trusted a local liberal Republican official. When the army revolted, the result was a terrible slaughter. In 1979 a mass grave was uncovered outside Zaragoza with 7,000 bodies.

Almost everywhere in Spain where union activists moved aggressively against the military uprising and were joined by the police, the army coup was defeated. In Madrid many members of the Assault Guard were socialists. There were not many places where the people defeated the army without the aid of the police. Nowhere in Spain did army soldiers rebel against their officers unless they were being besieged by angry workers and police.

The officers in the Spanish navy were mostly blue-blood sons of the land-owning oligarchy. They had a low opinion of the lower ranks of sailors. Many Spanish sailors had previously worked in the Spanish commercial shipping industry where they had often been members of the CNT or UGT unions. They had a low opinion of their officers. The night before July 19th sailors in the Spanish fleet held secret meetings, elected ship committees, and proceeded to arrest or shoot their fascist officers.

At the end of two weeks, the fascist generals had lost about half the personnel of the army in Spain, 40 percent of the police personnel, two-thirds of the navy and most of the air force. The army coup had been defeated in two-thirds of Spain, including the industrialized areas and the big cities. The most important force available to the fascist generals was the 25,000-man Army of Africa, a battle-hardened colonial force of mercenaries and thugs. With the Spanish sailors in control of the country’s warships in July, and these ships prowling the straights of Gibraltar, the water-borne transit of the Army of Africa to Spain from Morocco was blocked momentarily. At this point, Nazi Germany came to the aid of the fascist Spanish generals by providing German aircraft and pilots to ferry the Army of Africa to Spain — the first airlift of an entire army into action in military history. With oil refineries and gasoline stocks seized by the workers in Spain, the fascist army was in danger of running out of gas. Texaco then provided another form of international aid. The CEO of that company ordered tankers at sea to put into ports controlled by the fascist army. The company provided $5 million of gasoline on credit.

Meanwhile, officers in the British navy in Gibraltar were horrified at the sight of Spanish warships run by lower-rank sailors showing casual disregard for traditional rules of dress and exchanging clenched-fist salutes. The British naval officers directly aided the Spanish fascists. When the Spanish army was besieging the coastal town of Algeciras from the landside, sailors of the Spanish fleet attempted to protect the town by firing their ships’ guns at the army. The British navy blocked this by moving British ships in front of the town.

Looking back etc cont. No 2

Mon Aug 07, 2006 11:26

In towns that were taken by the army, a purge committee was set up. Typically this would consist of a police official, a priest, a representative of the fascist Falange, and a local landowner. Lists were drawn up of known leftists and executions were carried out systematically. According to a member of the Falange: “Eighty percent of those being executed in the rearguard were workers. The repression was aimed at decimating the working class, destroying its power…It was a class war.”(14) It is estimated that authorities executed between 100,000 and 200,000 people in the fascist zone during the civil war.

After the defeat of the army in Barcelona on July 20th, hundreds of thousands of people poured out into the streets, to celebrate the victory. The chief of police, Frederic Escofet, worried about growing CNT power, sent police to the military arms depot at Sant Andreu where 30,000 rifles were stored. They arrived too late. The CNT had already confiscated the weapons(15). The CNT also seized the fortifications on Montjuich, overlooking Barcelona. In addition to distributing arms to its neighborhood defense groups, the CNT moved immediately to create an army of its own. Thousands of men and women from the CNT unions were recruited. The CNT defense committee requisitioned motor vehicles — taxis, cars of the well-to-do, buses, and trucks. Motorized militia units called columns were organized for the purpose of mounting an offensive to drive the army out of Catalonia and nearby regions. A typical column was about the size of a military division. The ultimate decision-making authority in each column was the assembly of the militia members. The assembly elected the commanding officer (“chief delegate”) of the column. The sub-units each elected a delegate to a “war committee” — the administrative committee of the column. A sympathetic non-com or officer from the Spanish army was attached to each column as a technical advisor. The overall direction of the columns was the work of the CNT union defense committee. During the summer of 1936, the labor militia columns from Valencia and Catalonia drove the fascist army out of Catalonia and 100 kilometers west across the region of Aragon — the largest amount of territory gained and held by the anti-fascist forces in the civil war.

Barcelona was the center of the Spanish motor vehicle industry. After July 19th the CNT metallurgical union moved to immediately confiscate the assets of this industry, to convert it to war production for the union militia. In a matter of weeks, the CNT had set up 24 metalworking and chemical factories making shells, explosives and armored vehicles for the revolutionary labor army.

The Debate in the CNT Over Political Power According to his associates, Lluis Companys was anxious and nervous on July 20th. His police chief, Escofet, had just warned him that the police could no longer ensure a re-assertion of government authority(16). The CNT now held de facto armed power in Catalonia. Companys was the president of the Generalitat de Catalunya (Commonwealth of Catalonia — an autonomous regional parliamentary government) and head of the populist, Catalan nationalist Esquerra (Partit Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya — Left Republican Party of Catalonia). The Esquerra had defeated the Catalan League (Lliga Catalana), the party of Catalan big business, in the elections of February 1936. The Catalan middle strata — owners of small mercantile and industrial businesses, small landlords, lawyers and professionals, managers, family farmers — were the social base of the Esquerra. Catalan white collar employees, in the banks and government , did not identify as “working class,” and supported the Esquerra.

Companys was the former lawyer of the CNT, and knew many of the anarchists. He needed to figure out an appeal to them that would prevent the overthrow of his government.

Ricardo Sanz, Buenaventura Durruti, and Joan Garcia Oliver were leading activists on the CNT regional defense committee, and members of Nosotros (“Us”) — a revolutionary group that had joined the FAI in recent months. Companys invited them to his office on July 20th. Companys told them: “First of all I must say that the CNT and the FAI have never been treated with the proper importance which they deserve. You have always been harshly prosecuted. And I, who used to be with you, was forced by political realities to oppose you and hound you. You are now in control of the city and Catalonia because you alone routed the fascist militarists. But let me remind you that you didn’t lack help today from men of my party, as well as from the Assault and Presidential Guards….You have won and the power is in your hands. If you don’t need me and if you don’t want me as President of Catalonia, tell me now and I will be only one more soldier in the struggle…You can count on my loyalty as a man and a party leader who believes that a shameful past came to an end today and I sincerely hope that Catalonia will be in the vanguard of the countries who are the most progressive in social matters.”(17) Companys then proposed the CNT’s participation in an Anti-fascist Militia Committee, controlled by the Popular Front parties, to run the armed effort against the fascist military. This was a clever gambit because its nominal independence of the state would allow anarchists to say they weren’t participating in a government body but would draw them into a course of action controlled by the Popular Front party leaders, and would leave the government intact. It was the personal opinion of Sanz, Durruti and Garcia Oliver that the CNT should overthrow the Generalitat(18), but they didn’t express that opinion to Companys. They told him that the CNT had to decide what to do. That night, the CNT local labor council in Barcelona had a meeting to decide its stance on this question. At that meeting, Garcia Oliver argued that “the movement should take power.” Felix Carrasquer, a schoolteacher, and Diego Abad de Santillan, both representing the FAI, argued against. The debate, however, was framed in terms of the question: “Should we impose our vision of libertarian communism? Should the CNT rule alone?” Carrasquer and Abad de Santillan argued that this would be a dictatorship imposed by a minority. After a heated debate, the Barcelona labor council voted against the option of taking power(19). However, this didn’t settle the question. The actual decision would be made by a regional plenary of all the CNT local labor councils in Catalonia. The regional secretary called this meeting for July 23rd. The regional plenary was a meeting of over 500 CNT local labor council delegates. The meeting was held in the Casa de Cambó, the former employers’ association headquarters. This large building had just been seized as a revolutionary act, to provide space for the CNT, FAI and Mujeres Libres (Free Women — the anarchist women’s organization).

The delegation from the labor council of Bajo Llobregat proposed that the unions should take power and overthrow the Generlitat; now was the moment to carry out the CNT’s revolutionary program, in their view. Bajo Llobregat was an area of industrial suburbs on the south edge of Barcelona, an area that had been built up during the industrial boom of the 1920s. The Bajo Llobregat delegation asked Garcia Oliver to articulate their position in the debate. A charismatic speaker, Garcia Oliver had worked most of his life as a waiter, when he wasn’t in jail. His life-long experience of class struggle left him with a strong sense that the working class would have to impose its will on society if it was ever to free itself. Garcia Oliver emphasized that a revolutionary process must be governed, it cannot be left with a power vacuum, which “would allow the various Marxist tendencies to take control and obliterate us.” The regional secretary, Mariano Vazquez — a construction worker of gypsy origin — maintained that they should accept Companys’ offer of participation in an Anti-fascist Militia Committee provisionally while “governing from the streets.” The main speakers against Garcia Oliver were Federica Montseny and Diego Abad de Santillan. Montseny — an anarchist novelist and charismatic speaker who owned a house in an affluent neighborhood in Barcelona — was a follower of the extreme individualist anarchism of Max Stirner. Montseny and Abad de Santillan were both members of the Nervio group, which had joined the FAI in recent months. Both worked for the anarchist publishing cooperative that had been founded by Montseny’s parents. Montseny and de Santillan were at this meeting as representatives of the FAI. Montseny argued that Garcia Oliver’s proposal to carry out the CNT’s “libertarian communist” program would mean the imposition of an “anarchist dictatorship” over the population. Abad de Santillan focused on the danger of foreign intervention, pointing to the presence off the coast of British warships.

In reply, Garcia Oliver pointed out that he had never spoken of a “dictatorship” of anarchists or of the CNT. He objected to calling the rule of the workers’ unions a “dictatorship.” He argued that, as the majority labor organization, the CNT had an obligation to lead the way forward in the revolution and he believed that the libertarian, democratic practices and ideology of the CNT unions would be a guarantee that union governance of the society would not degenerate into an authoritarian regime. He tagged Abad de Santillan’s comments as just an appeal to fear. In response to Vazquez, he said that at least the regional secretary acknowledged that a revolution must be governed. But he insisted that the CNT must be in charge of making the revolution.

While Garcia Oliver was speaking, he noticed that Fidel Miró — another member of the Nervio group and an activist in the Libertarian Youth — was moving from delegation to delegation in the hall, lining up votes. When the vote was taken, the proposal for collaboration with the Popular Front parties on the Anti-fascist Militia Committee got the majority(20). In his memoir, Garcia Oliver says that the delegates had been gathered in haste, without the opportunity to consult activists in the unions or discuss the implications of what was being decided. Garcia Oliver believed that the meeting had been unduly influenced by “petty bourgeois anarchist intellectuals” like Montseny and Abad de Santillan, who had a certain influence through the anarchist press in Catalonia. But why were the labor council delegates swayed by the remarks of Montseny and de Santillan? Conceiving of union political power as a “CNT dictatorship” may be the result of an ambiguity in the syndicalist concept of “prefigurative” politics. The idea that the libertarian unions “prefigure” a society of self-management could be interpreted to mean that the union itself takes over economic and political management of the society — and syndicalists have sometimes talked in that way. This might lead to the conclusion that the CNT itself would be the governing structure for the economy and polity. Hence a “CNT dictatorship.”

But the syndicalist concept of prefigurative politics, of “building the new society in the shell of the old,” doesn’t have to be interpreted that way. It could be understood to mean that practices and habits of participatory democracy are built up through the mass union organizations and then this is reflected in new structures of worker management of the economy and structures of political governance, separate from the union itself. The 350,000-member CNT was the majority labor organization in Catalonia. It would have a great influence over the direction taken by a structure of political power in which the FOUS and UGT unions also participated, as minorities.

Montseny’s talk of “CNT dictatorship” was tailored to appeal to anarchist prejudices. But this did not properly frame the situation facing the CNT at this time. In the coming months, the CNT would insist that its aim was “the triumph of the proletarian revolution.” Victory in this endeavor would require that the working class dissolve the institutional basis of the power of classes that dominate and exploit the working class. The social base of the Republican political parties in Spain were the small business and professional/managerial classes.

These social classes would inevitably oppose the proletarian revolution, as it would dissolve their class privilege and power. Any power retained by the Republican and Basque Nationalist party leaders in governance would be used to obstruct the process of working class empowerment. Moreover, the Communist Party, since the adoption of its “Popular Front” orientation, and the social-democratic wing of the PSOE, were allied with these anti-fascist middle strata.

On the other hand, it was equally clear that a working class victory would require the maximum of working class unity. The CNT could not ignore the 1.4 million workers in the UGT. And in Catalonia, there were also the 70,000 workers in the POUM-controlled FOUS unions. In a life or death struggle against the army, the masses of CNT members would insist that the CNT work out an alliance with the other working class organizations. The CNT had already committed itself to a “revolutionary workers’ alliance” with the UGT at its congress in May. The CNT-UGT unity in the uprising in Asturias in October 1934 was an example that everyone was familiar with.

If the CNT could not come up with a practical program for a unified working class political power, this would mean that the only alternative would be the strategy being promoted by the Communists: a top-down unity of leaders of the Popular Front parties through a rebuilt Republican state. No other option was realistic. Either the CNT took political power jointly with the other unions, or the need for unity in the struggle against the fascist army would lead to the Popular Front solution. In that case, the Spanish state would be rebuilt — a hierarchical apparatus that would be used to defend the interests of classes that dominate the working class.

Although the Republican state apparatus was temporarily disarmed, due to the revolt of the old army and police, and the construction of a revolutionary labor militia, the state apparatus still had considerable resources as long as it was left intact. It had social legitimacy in the eyes of the Republican middle classes, and it had control over the country’s financial system, gold reserves and foreign currency and trade relationships. Almost immediately after the defeat of the army coup in most of Spain, the Communist Party began beating the drum for re-construction of a conventional hierarchal army and police.

This means that the real question the CNT faced was how to create a joint governing structure for the country with the other unions, wiping away the old state apparatus and institutionalizing working class power. The CNT actually did come around to this conclusion…but it would take another six weeks of debate in the union.

The Anti-fascist Militia Committee was not an organ of working class “dual power.” The Popular Front leaders in fact controlled the committee, just like the government. The 350,000-member CNT held only three out of 15 seats on the committee, with another two representatives for the FAI. The UGT, which had only 100,000 members in Catalonia, also had three seats. The Esquerra’s farmers’ union had one seat. The middle-class Republican political parties had four representatives.

Within days of the military coup, a new political organization was formed in Catalonia — the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia (Partit Socialista Unificat de Catalunya — PSUC). This was formed from the merger of four small parties: the section of the PSOE in Catalonia, the Catalan Communist Party (PCC), the Proletarian Party (a Catalan nationalist worker group), and the Socialist Union (a social democratic group). The PSUC, with 6,000 members, became the affiliate of the Moscow-line Spanish Communist Party (PCE) in Catalonia. The PSUC had two seats on the Anti-fascist Militia Committee, even though the larger POUM had only one(21). The 70,000-member FOUS had no representatives. In August the CNT regional leaders in Catalonia would enter into a bureaucratic deal with the UGT to allow only UGT and CNT union cards for participation in the food rationing systems set up in the wake of the coup. This forced the dissolution of the FOUS. This was a sectarian error on the part of the leading anarcho-syndicalists. The POUM’s politics were closer to those of the CNT than the Moscow-line Communists. The Communists would soon cement their control over the UGT in Catalonia. Leaving the FOUS intact would have provided the CNT with an important ally.

The Anti-fascist Militia Committee proved to be ineffective. There was no unified policy or real coordination. Each organization used its posts as it wanted. The Esquerra, PSUC and POUM each had their own separate militia divisions, apart from the much larger union militia of the CNT. Each of these four organizations ran its own militia command and provided its own supply system for its militia. This was the pattern throughout Spain. This was not an effective way to run the armed struggle against the fascist army. There was a general failure at coordination. Leading CNT activists and militia leaders saw that there was clearly a need for a unified command and unified training and supply systems. If they couldn’t do this for the militia, there would inevitably be pressure to re-create a conventional army run by the Republican state. Within days of the military coup, the Communist Party started beating the drum for the re-creation of a conventional, top-down military. The revolutionary militia system could only be saved if the CNT could find a way to create a unified militia. The only way to do this would be to create a unified labor governance structure for Spain. The unions needed to take power.

To counter the drive to rebuild the old hierarchical army, Garcia Oliver gave a speech on August 10th, calling for a revolutionary people’s army:

“A people’s army growing out of the militia should be organized on new principles. We will organize a revolutionary military school where we will train technical officers who will not be carbon copies of the old officers, but rather simply technicians who will follow the instructions of officers who have proven their loyalty to the people and the proletariat.”(22) At another regional plenary of the CNT in Catalonia in the last days of August, Garcia Oliver, frustrated with the ineffectiveness of the Anti-fascist Militia Committee, once again proposed that the CNT take power, abolishing the Generalitat, removing the political party leaders from any role, and reducing the role of the UGT to a minority, in keeping with its size in Catalonia(23). On August 31st, José Giral, the Republican prime minister in Madrid, told a member of the CNT national committee: “Everything is in the hands of the CNT! The CNT directs the war as it wants but without sharing in the supreme responsibilities. Govern! Take power!”(24)

Finally, at a national plenary of the CNT on September 3rd, at the insistence of the regional delegation from Catalonia, the CNT decided to propose the formation of a revolutionary labor government to replace the national Popular Front government: a National Defense Council (Junta Nacional de Defensa) made up of seven delegates of the UGT and seven of the CNT, with Largo Caballero as president(25). The national council would be part of a federalist system with regional Councils of Defense. The authority of the councils would be limited to the social self-defense function — “people’s courts,” police, a unified People’s Militia. The Defense Councils would have no authority to intervene in the management of industry; industries would be managed by the workers.

The CNT proposed a unified People’s Militia that would be controlled by “joint CNT-UGT commissions.”(26) Organized labor would have a monopoly of armed power in Spain. A Russian agent in Spain wrote to the Soviet authorities: “The thought of creating such a council finds a wide response even among the masses that are not under the anarchists’ influence.”(27)

The CNT’s timing was off, however. For the first six weeks after the military coup, ineffective liberals presided over the government in Madrid. By early September, however, Largo Caballero, executive secretary of the UGT, had just been made prime minister. He had said publicly that the revolution had to be put on hold to defeat the fascist army. Marcel Rosenberg, the Soviet ambassador, warned Caballero that the CNT proposal would destroy the “international legitimacy” of the Spanish Republic. Manuel Azaña, President of the Republic, threatened to resign. To placate the Communists, CNT representatives met with the Central Committee of the PCE and assured them that they would still be represented via their trade union cadres in the UGT.

Largo Caballero and the Left Socialists had a history of wavering. They would talk about “proletarian revolution” one moment, then scurry back to a moderate social-democratic stance the next moment. To give Caballero some spine, they needed to put him over a barrel. In Catalonia they had the power to simply wipe away the Generalitat government and implement their proposal for a joint governing council with the other unions. Doing that could have forced the UGT to agree to extend this solution to all of Spain.

Regional defense councils were created in Asturias and Aragon. The Council of Asturias had 15 members, with the UGT in the majority. The middle-class Republicans were only given two representatives. In Aragon the initiative to form a CNT-controlled Regional Defense Council came from the CNT village unions in the zone of Aragon that had been liberated by the labor militia. But Catalonia was far more important than rural Aragon or Asturias. Catalonia had three-fourths of Spain’s industrial capacity and Spain’s largest city. If the Generalitat had been replaced with a working class governance structure, Caballero couldn’t have ignored this. But instead, the CNT of Catalonia went in the opposite direction. They joined the Generalitat government on September 26th. This completely undermined the CNT’s bargaining leverage with Caballero because it told him they weren’t serious about their Defense Council proposal.

While the negotiations with the UGT for a National Defense Council were going on in Madrid, Eduardo de Guzmán was editor of the CNT paper Castilla Libre in Madrid. In his view, the initiative to form a working-class government in Madrid was hindered by the CNT’s failure to take power in Barcelona. Even if the complete implementation of “libertarian communism” were not possible at the moment, it was possible to create “a proletarian government — total working-class democracy in which all sectors of the proletariat — but of the proletariat alone — would be represented….To make a revolution, power must be seized. If the CNT had done so in Catalonia, it would have helped, not hindered, our minority position in Madrid. But they believed that it was sufficient to have taken the streets, to have seized arms. They completely overlooked the importance of the state apparatus.”

According to de Guzmán, “the petty bourgeoisie was inevitably opposed to the proletariat. The Communists were recruiting in this class, and in alliance with the petty bourgeois Republicans were bound to gain strength if the Generalitat and the central government were reconstituted.” He believed that it was a mistake for the CNT to have not pushed for a working class government at the very beginning when there was no effective government in Madrid at all. “A revolutionary moment of great promise had been lost,” in his opinion (28). De Guzmán suggests that there was a confusion about “apoliticism” in the CNT. In his view it should mean “simply not to participate in the farce of [parliamentary] elections.” This is not the same as saying that a polity — a structure of popular governance — is not needed to replace the state. Just as syndicalists had always emphasized the continuity of social production being maintained in a process of social transformation, the same argument can be made for the political functions — making and enforcing the basic rules in society. These are also necessary functions. To respond to Socialist concerns about ensuring the loyalty of the “anti-fascist petty bourgeoisie,” the CNT, at another national plenary in mid-September, modified the National Defense Council proposal so that it would be made up of five CNT delegates, five UGT delegates, and four representatives of the Republican Parties. With this modification, one of the smaller Republican parties — the Federal Republicans — endorsed the CNT proposal. But Largo Caballero still refused this “leap outside the bounds of the Constitution.” With the CNT joining the Generalitat government, he knew the CNT wasn’t serious. Caballero made a counter proposal: The CNT would join the existing Popular Front government. Finally, at yet another national plenary on September 28th, the treintista national secretary of the CNT, Horacio Prieto, pushed for accepting Caballero’s offer. The delegation from Catalonia was adamantly opposed to this. The regional organization in Catalonia was inconsistent — it opposed the CNT doing at the national level what it had done in Catalonia.

Having failed to chart a coherent course for unifying the working class in building new structures of governance, to replace the Republican state, the CNT finally joined the national Popular Front government on November 4, receiving only four out of 18 posts in the cabinet(29). At the first meeting of the new government, Joan Peiró proposed that the government authorize the complete collectivization of the Spanish economy. This initiative was blocked by the objections of the middle class Republicans, Basque Nationalists, and their social-democratic and Communist allies. Throughout the month of October, Solidaridad Obrera, the CNT’s daily paper in Barcelona, had mounted a major campaign in favor of the proposal for a joint CNT-UGT National Defense Council. Now that the CNT had opted for Popular Front collaboration, the CNT regional committee wanted a less “intransigently revolutionary” line at Solidaridad Obrera. Among the staff members who were fired due to their opposition to the policy of Popular Front collaboration was a disabled journalist, Jaime Balius(30) and the paper’s managing editor, Liberto Callejas. Balius and Callejas would later participate in an attempt to revive the labor defense council proposal in the spring of 1937.

endnotes??

by gasdf

Fri Aug 18, 2006 05:02

where are the end notes that the text refers to??

end notes for Spain essay

by Tom Wetzel - WSA

Fri Aug 18, 2006 13:31

You can find the whole thing with the end notes at the WSA site:

http://www.workersolidarity.org/Spanishrevolution.html

Tom Wetzel

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