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. The CNT discreetly urged recourse to the ballot box and the figures clearly suggest it had an impact: in 1933 the left claimed 3,200,000 votes, 20 percent of the turn-out; in 1936 that figure rose to 4,800,000, or 35 percent—meaning an additional 1,600,000 votes. Of course, we also have to include in this figure a number of returned economic migrants—who had left as the result of the aftermath of the world depression in 1929—plus younger, newly qualifying voters and the franchise granted to women in 1931.
What might the CNT input have been? The figure of 1,000,000 votes, which was bandied about by the CNT itself, strikes me as acceptable.
The left secured a slender 1.1 percent majority with a fifty-three-seat43 margin over the right, thanks to the system of proportional representation in use. Actually, the right retained much of its enormous clout.
The most remarkable change was the strides made by the Communist Party during this period, with fourteen deputies returned as against just one in 1933. Just to review the results: the Party took 12,900 votes in Málaga in 1933; by 1936 this had risen to 52,750. The 3,000 Communist Party voters in Cádiz in 1933 soared to 97,000. Oviedo’s 16,830 swelled to 170,500 and so on. There was a baffling paradox in that the membership of the Party, according to the Party’s own sources, sat at between 17,000 and 30,000,44 and nationally the Party had taken 1,800,000 votes. The only explanation is that it raked in CNT voters, and, in fact, thirteen of its fourteen deputies came from regions where anarchists were in the majority.
This political faux pas by the cenetistas (boosting their fiercest ideological foe) can be explained by their grudges against the UGT and the PSOE.
The Popular Front got a rapturous welcome, and pressure from the people secured the much-wanted release of political prisoners. As in 1931 there were no thoroughgoing reforms announced. The police continued to open fire on workers. The government was incapable of taking effective action. Right-wing outrages proliferated, thanks to the handiwork of the Falange, a pro-Mussolini group led by José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the son of the man who had been dictator from 1923 to 1927. Tensions were running high on the left, as highlighted by the headlines in Solidaridad Obrera between 1 and 18 July 1936:
Should the UGT fail to come up with a prompt response to the cordial appeal issuing from the Extra-ordinary Congress of the CNT, the responsibility for what may ensue will fall entirely upon the heads of the socialists.45
The venture is a mighty one, especially with the trapeze-artists of the POUM on the scene. But enthusiasm on your part, plus pressure from the Confederation will steer you to victory.46 (There is a cartoon by Gallo showing hands bound with manacles bearing the initials UGT.)47
(Another Gallo cartoon shows a woman gagged—the revolutionary press—and a man carrying a hammer and sickle urging her to be quiet: behind him looms a monster marked with a swastika.)48
Enough! Only lunatics and agents provocateurs can imagine a connection between fascism and anarchism […] Let the gentlemen from the Popular Front watch their step!49
Lack of vision in fraught times and the counter-revolutionary behaviour of Spanish marxism opened the gates to fascism.50
And another Gallo cartoon, at the foot of a photograph from the CNT construction strike in Madrid, a fiefdom of the UGT: two pistols marked UGT and CNT are trained on each other with the caption: “No!”51
The army’s attempted coup d’état was the logical consequence of the republican government’s passivity. Yet the CNT had, months earlier, anticipated the course that events were going to take:
[…] Right-wing elements are ready to trigger an army revolt […] Morocco seems to be the main concentration and epicenter of the plot […] If the plotters light the fire, opposition must be taken to its ultimate consequences, and the liberal bourgeoisie
