The battle for Spain: the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 (23 page)

The contradictions of political power were to confront the anarchists in many forms. Their manifesto of 1917, for example, had condemned all festivals, such as bullfights and indecent cabarets which can brutalize the people. But to act as dictatorial censors was an even worse affront to their beliefs. Meanwhile the anarcho-feminist Mujeres Libres, now 30,000 strong,
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were sticking posters over the walls of the red light district, trying to persuade prostitutes to give up their way of life. They offered and ran training courses for them to acquire skills for productive work, but other anarchists were less patient. According to the sympathetic French observer Kaminski, they shot pimps and drug dealers on the spot.

A notable phenomenon of the war was the spontaneous growth of a women’s movement after the 1936 elections. It was born, not of literature or theory from abroad (except perhaps a few translations of Emma Goldman), but of women’s instinctive conviction that the overthrow of the class system should mean the end of the patriarchal system as well. The anarchists had always declared the equality of all human beings, but as the Mujeres Libres emphasized, relationships still remained feudal. The most blatant way in which the anarchists had failed to live up to their professed ideals was the different levels of pay for men and women in most CNT enterprises. The Socialist Youth was another major focal point for feminism.

Little headway was made outside the cities, although the greatest demonstration of the new equality was the fact of having militiawomen fighting in the front line. No figures are available, but there were probably not many more than 1,000 women at the front. There were, however, several thousand under arms in the rear areas and a women’s battalion took part in the defence of Madrid. (The German ambassador was shocked when, one day, Franco ordered the execution of some captured militiawomen and then calmly continued to eat his lunch.) This move towards equal participation was severely curtailed under the increasingly authoritarian direction of the war effort as the military situation deteriorated. By 1938 women had returned to a strictly auxiliary role.
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One observer in Barcelona commented on the attitude towards buildings. He wrote that the people were inclined to destroy symbols, but that they respected in a naive and sometimes exaggerated way everything which seemed useful. Religious buildings, patriotic monuments and the women’s prison were demolished or burned down, while hospitals and schools were respected almost with the reverence which the nationalists accorded to churches.

The most important achievement of the republican government of 1931–3 had been in education and reducing illiteracy. The measures limiting Church involvement in education created a great void in the system to begin with, but the school-building and teacher-training programmes were correspondingly ambitious. The Republic claimed to have built 7,000 schools as opposed to only 1,000 during the previous 22 years. An illiteracy rate of nearly 50 per cent in most areas under the monarchy was drastically reduced. Many imaginative projects, such as García Lorca’s travelling theatres, were part of an energetic attempt to help the rural mass free itself from the vulnerability of ignorance. All the time, independently of government-sponsored efforts, the
casas del pueblo
of the UGT and the
ateneos libertarios
of the anarchists continued their efforts in this direction.
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During the war it was above all the earnest study of uneducated militiamen in the trenches which so impressed foreign visitors like Saint-Exupéry.

The outward signs of working-class power were everywhere in Barcelona. Party banners hung from public buildings, especially the black and red diagonal flag of the CNT. The anarchists had installed their headquarters in the former premises of the Employers’ Federation, while the communist-controlled PSUC led by Joan Comorera had taken over the Hotel Colón. The POUM had seized the Hotel Falcón, though their main power base was in Lérida. The POUM was growing because it seemed to offer a middle course between the anarchists and the communists. But, as Andrés Nin, their leader, had once been closely associated with Trotsky, the Stalinists hated the POUM even more than the anarchists. They ignored the fact that Trotsky and his Fourth International frequently attacked the POUM.

Barcelona had always been a lively city and the July revolution hardly calmed it. Expropriated cars roared around at high speed, often causing accidents, but such antics were soon stopped when petrol was issued only for essential journeys. Loudspeakers attached to trees on the avenues relayed music and broadcast ludicrously optimistic news bulletins from time to time. These were seized on by groups discussing events such as the attack on Saragossa, whose fall they expected at any moment. It was a world of instant friendship, with the formal expression of address no longer used. Foreigners were welcomed and the anti-fascist cause was explained repeatedly. Workers possessed a simple faith that if everything was made clear, the democracies could not fail to help them against Franco, Hitler and Mussolini.

All around a heady atmosphere of excitement and optimism prevailed. Gerald Brenan said that visitors to Barcelona in the autumn of 1936 would never forget the moving and uplifting experience. Foreigners who gave a tip had it returned politely with an explanation of why the practice corrupted both the giver and the receiver. Probably the greatest contrast between Madrid and Barcelona was in the use of hotels. In the capital Gaylords was later taken over by the Communist Party as a luxurious billet for its senior functionaries and Russian advisers. In Barcelona the Ritz was used by the CNT and the UGT as Gastronomic Unit Number One–a public canteen for all those in need.

The most outspoken champions of private property were not the liberal republicans, as might have been expected, but the Communist Party and its Catalan subsidiary, the PSUC. Both were following the Comintern line of concealing the revolution. La Pasionaria and other members of their central committee emphatically denied that any form of revolution was happening in Spain, and vigorously defended businessmen and small landowners. This was at a time when rich peasants,
kulaks
, were dying in Gulag camps. The Comintern, without any acknowledgement of such a flagrant contradiction, recorded the communist slogans prescribed for the countryside round Valencia: ‘We respect those who want to work their land as a collective, but we also request respect for those who want to cultivate their land individually’; and ‘To oppress the interests of petty farmers means oppressing the fathers of our soldiers’.
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This anti-revolutionary stance, prescribed by Moscow, brought the middle classes into the communist ranks in great numbers. Even the traditional newspapers of the Catalan business community,
La Vanguardia
and
Noticiero
, praised the Soviet model of discipline. Meanwhile, the anarchist model had already made itself felt throughout the republican zone, but above all down the Mediterranean coastal belt.

This extraordinary mass movement of worker self-management still provokes powerful controversy. The liberal government and the Communist Party regarded it as a major obstacle to their attempts to organize the war effort. They were convinced that central control was vital in a country such as Spain with its strong parochialism and reluctance to react to a threat unless it was close. For example, the anarchists of Catalonia felt that to recapture Saragossa would be tantamount to winning the war. The advance of the Army of Africa in the south-west could almost have been in a foreign country, as far as they were concerned. The exponents of self-management, on the other hand, argued that there would be no motive for fighting if the social revolution were not allowed to continue. Having done the fighting in July when the government refused to arm them, the anarchists bitterly resented the way the government expected them to surrender all their gains. This fundamental clash of attitudes undermined the unity of the Republican alliance. The advocates of a centralized state were to win the struggle in 1937, but the morale of the population was mortally stricken by the Communist Party’s bid for power in the process.

The collectives in republican Spain were not like the state collectives of the Soviet Union. They were based on the joint ownership and management of the land or factory. Alongside them were socialized industries, restructured and run by the CNT and UGT as well as private companies under joint worker-owner control. Co-operatives marketing the produce of individual smallholders and artisans also existed, although these were not new. They had a long tradition in many parts of the country, especially in fishing communities. There were estimated to have been around 100,000 people involved in co-operative enterprises in Catalonia alone before the civil war. The CNT was, of course, the prime mover in this development, but UGT members also contributed to it.
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The regions most affected were Catalonia and Aragón, where about 70 per cent of the workforce was involved. The total for the whole of republican territory was nearly 800,000 on the land and a little over a million in industry. In Barcelona, worker committees took over all the services, the oil monopoly, the shipping companies, heavy engineering firms such as Vulcano, the Ford motor company, chemical companies, the textile industry and a host of smaller enterprises.

Any assumption by foreign journalists that the phenomenon simply represented a romantic return to the village communes of the Middle Ages was inaccurate. Modernization was no longer feared because the workers controlled its effects. Both on the land and in the factories technical improvements and rationalization could be carried out in ways that would previously have led to bitter strikes. The CNT woodworkers union shut down hundreds of inefficient workshops so as to concentrate production in large plants. The whole industry was reorganized on a vertical basis from felling timber to the finished product. Similar structural changes were carried out in other industries as diverse as leather goods, light engineering, textiles and baking. There were, however, serious problems in obtaining new machinery to convert companies which were irrelevant, like luxury goods, or underused because of raw-material shortages, like the textile industry. They were caused principally by the Madrid government’s attempt to reassert its control by refusing foreign exchange to collectivized enterprises.

The social revolution in Catalonian industry was soon threatened in several ways. A sizeable part of the home market had been lost in the rising. The peseta had fallen sharply in value on the outbreak of the war, so imported raw materials cost nearly 50 per cent more in under five months. This was accompanied by an unofficial trade embargo which the pro-nationalist governors of the Bank of Spain had requested among the international business community. Meanwhile, the central government tried to exert control through withholding credits and foreign exchange. Largo Caballero, the arch-rival of the anarchists, was even to offer the government contract for uniforms to foreign companies, rather than give it to CNT textile factories.
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Recent studies indicate that reductions in industrial output during the course of the war cannot really be attributed to ‘revolutionary disorder’.
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There were sometimes long discussions and wrangles within the worker committees, but when the issues were clear, little time was wasted. Services such as water, gas and electricity were working under their new management within hours of the storming of the Atarazanas barracks. Using the framework agreed at the Saragossa conference, a conversion of appropriate factories to war production meant that metallurgical concerns had started to produce armoured cars by 22 July. Although not sophisticated, they were not all crudely improvised contraptions. The industrial workers of Catalonia were the most skilled in Spain. The Austrian sociologist Franz Borkenau also pointed out the great difference it made not to have technicians obstructed, as occurred in Soviet Russia.
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After defeating the attempted coup in Barcelona and reorganizing production so quickly, the anarchists were angry at the Madrid government’s attempt to regain control through the denial of credits. A plan for seizing part of the Spanish gold reserves so as to bypass the central government’s denial of foreign exchange was considered, but rejected, by the CNT regional committee. Apart from finance, the other main weakness was the lack of co-ordination between co-operatives within a particular industry. However, government performance on industrial matters was such that it is doubtful whether ministers in Madrid would have done much better.

At the same time as the transformation of industry, there was a mushroom growth of agricultural collectives in the southern part of Republican territory. They were organized by CNT members, either on their own or in conjunction with the UGT. The UGT became involved because it recognized that collectivization was the most practical method of farming the less fertile
latifundia
. It would perhaps also be true to say that in many places the socialists followed this course to avoid being usurped by the anarchists in what they regarded as their fiefs.

In Aragón some collectives were installed forcibly by anarchist militia, especially the Durruti column. Their impatience to get the harvest in to feed the cities, as well as the fervour of their beliefs, sometimes led to violence. Aragonese peasants resented being told what to do by overenthusiastic Catalan industrial workers and many of them had fears of Russian-style collectives. Borkenau showed in an example how much more effective other means could be. The anarchist nucleus achieved a ‘considerable improvement for the peasants and yet was wise enough not to try to force the conversion of the reluctant part of the village, but to wait till the example of the others should take effect’.
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Not surprisingly, a collective begun in that way worked best. Overall, studies of the collectivization conclude that ‘the experiment was a success for the poor peasants of Aragón’.
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