LITMIR.BIZ

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the country so sorely needed, even from the point of view of a forward-looking capitalism, if only for straightforward surgical reasons and out of the merest regard for the lives of the majority of the population. The workers, hungry for immediate, real and definitive socio-economic changes could not understand the snail’s pace. The masses craved change and yearned for social revolution.

      At the grassroots level in Asturias in 1934, a formal alliance had been brokered, as we have seen, between the UGT and the CNT. And out of a socialist-organised uprising there spontaneously emerged a workers’ alliance, under the UHP. To all workers, the UHP became a synonym for immediate revolutionary social change.

      All of this ensured that the insults and mutual abuse swapped between the cenetista bigwigs (well-ensconced leaders barely—or not at all—answerable to the rank and file) were outweighed by the mutual reconciliation that culminated at the Zaragoza congress of May 1936. But the gulf between the rank and file membership and the leadership was not tackled, no more than by rotation of offices, which was not so much part of CNT practice as a response to police action when the unions were forced to fill vacancies created by the arrest of comrades.

      In reality, within the CNT there were two lines on revolution and libertarian communism (see Appendix V below): that of the bigwigs who sought a revolution from above on a date of their own choosing, and that of the grassroots members out for immediate direct action designed to trigger a thoroughgoing social change in the workplace, in the barrio or at village level.

      From the stances adopted in 1936–1939 and in 1944–1948, we may infer that the bigwigs believed in the value of alliance with some of the bourgeoisie—and later, even with the monarchy—as a means of directing and bolstering the CNT. This was utter nonsense, as would have been obvious had they actually explored writings and experiences of Bakunin, Kropotkin and anarchists who had emigrated from the USSR. This was all the more nonsensical when they had themselves witnessed the treachery of German socialists and like-minded trade unionists, calculated to eradicate revolutionary workers (Spartakists and direct actionists), and were aware of US intervention in its Central American backyard.

      The CNT bigwigs emblazoned a superficial anarcho-syndicalism and anarchism (see Appendices VI, IV and V), which explains how they could so glibly and lastingly enter the governments of Catalonia and Spain (respectively, September 1936–May 1937 and November 1936–May 1937, and again from April 1938 until March 1939).

      It is telling that there has been no analysis of the CNT’s collaboration in government between 1936 and 1939, not in exile (pending a congress within Spain) nor within the Peninsula (driven by the need to organise first and foremost and to head off controversy), for which reason the polemics endure, and theoretical confusion persists. This is why it is important to know the actual numbers of militants on the payroll of the Organisation. As Pestaña has it:

      The claim in public that we are against paid officials, and the private understanding that in the day to day running of the organisation we have them, strikes me as an act of hypocrisy out of place in our group where we are forever claiming full responsibility for our actions.

Officially, we have no paid officials today, but the editors of Solidaridad Obrera are paid.39 Off the record, under the table, so to speak, there are two paid and permanent posts on the National Committee; one or two—more often two than one—on the Regional Committee of Catalonia; two paid posts within the Barcelona Local Federation; and a number of Barcelona unions, some of which also have two or three paid officials. But let us repeat that this is off the record and such payments are justified by invoking the tasks they perform.

Not that the Catalan organisation is alone in having paid officials: the practice applies to virtually every region of Spain.40

      Having thirty-odd paid officials out of a membership of about 550,000 and a catchment area twice that size is a trifling matter in terms of material benefits, but it is huge in terms of influence and the exercise of power over the rest.

That situation was flying in the face of the 1919 congress, which had decided that only the general secretary would be paid (approximately the wage of a skilled worker). But the “non-remuneration policy operated a selection of leaders among the most dedicated, men who owned nothing and remained entrenched in their refus de parvenir”.41 With the upshot that most of the CNT officials carried out their trade union duties after the day’s work was done and sometimes had to lay out money for the travel essential to keeping in touch.

      Another weakness was the rejection, for fear of bureaucratisation, of the federations of industry for which some militants lobbied. According to the militants, these federations had to be organised along the lines of horizontal and vertical trusts (for, say, the metalworking, transport industries, etc., embracing all of the unions engaged in them), these being better suited to the concentration of capital whilst also offering a foretaste of the unions taking over the running of the economy themselves. Without a shadow of a doubt, they would have enabled a clearer appreciation of what needed collectivising. And all the propaganda books and pamphlets peddling libertarian communism (above all those from Isaac Puente, inspired by Besnard) described a post-revolutionary regime, organised by and for the workers, without the transitional period called for by the Marxists, and with federations of industry and agriculture and inter-related regional bodies.

Another drawback was follower-ism and leader-ism, even in the absence of bureaucratisation. This was manifest in culture, in the expertise—be it economic, political or technical (e.g. in the manufacture of explosives)—that some militants had acquired, despite exhausting toil for poverty wages. Such militants possessed experience very often superior to the bourgeois professionals who operated in the same field (such as that displayed by Peiró when he unmasked police skullduggery during the years of pistolerismo in Barcelona), and so they wielded an intellectual sway over many union members.42 In fact, this is commonplace in group sociology, as is evident in the case of José Díaz, who defected from the CNT to the Communist Party along with the membership of his trade union, the dockworkers of Seville; as well as Andrés Nin and his influence in Lérida; Stalin and the Georgians; Trotsky and the Russian Jews; and so on. Structures and a grounding in anarcho-syndicalism were therefore not enough to thwart this deviation, although they did minimise it: the stream of militants whom we have named proves that the mere existence of a leader was no impediment to the training of leadership material.

      The breaking dawn and shortsightedness

      The UHP articulated the deep-seated yearnings of the Spanish workers, as did all the attempted revolutions since January 1932. Above and beyond party political squabbles, currents and factions within each current, reality itself cried out for social change.

      Contrary to the experience elsewhere in Europe, Spanish workers had known no profound changes in the feudal, Catholic, landed-property system because of the bourgeoisie’s failure to force the pace. The absence of left- or right-wing politics and the tentative, timid and sluggish tactics of the republican governments from 1931 onwards merely fuelled their impatience. The Second Republic of 1931 proclaimed itself to be “a democratic republic of workers of all sorts, organised into a regimen of Freedom and Justice” (Article 1 of the constitution). It boasted, “The Spanish state has no official religion” (Article 3) and that “Spain abjures war as an instrument of national policy”, in addition to a long litany of moderately interesting measures. This was empty rhetoric bereft of economic equality and with the admixture of brutal, even criminal repression by the forces of order. But the poor took for granted that the Republic was now a reality and that it was poised to work in their interests.

      Against this backdrop of expectations and demands with regard to social change, the apparent defeats suffered by libertarian communism in 1932, in January and December 1933, and the UHP in Asturias in 1934 actually proved to be glimmers of hope, paving the way for further attempted revolutions.

      In 1936, the left came together in order to win the elections.

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