DOMENECH was taking time off from serving on the supplies committee which had the task of provisioning Barcelona.11 But as a glassworker and union secretary he was concerned about his industry ‘now that the revolution was staring us in the face’. He told the militants to call a meeting with the employers. Beforehand, he arranged to have two toughs with rifles standing behind him at the table where he would preside.
—The idea was, well, not that they should do anything but because, coño, this was the revolution!
‘Well, señores,’ I said, opening the meeting, ‘you are the employers and we, at the moment, are in the full spate of revolution. Right now, if we felt like it, we could load you all into a lorry and that would be the end of it.’ You should have seen their backsides wriggling on their chairs! ‘But no, what we have to do right now is set about protecting your interests and ours.’
‘Yes, oh yes,’ they all replied. ‘Of course.’
‘Well now, it’s clear that you employers really compete in an unfair and disloyal manner amongst yourselves. You try to undercut each other with unstated discounts, you buy large quantities of glass to get the factory discount and then often undertake work you don’t need. All this can’t continue. You should have formed an employers’ association a long time ago.’
‘Yes, yes,’ some of them said, nodding.
‘All right,’ I continued, ‘we’ll do something straight away. We’ll draw up a document creating an association: The Mirror and Plate Glass Employers’ Society.’ We drew up the document; one by one they signed it. They were silent.
‘Now we’re going to draw up another document which cedes all the Society’s rights to the union.’
‘¡Hombre, no! ¡Hombre!’ They were all shouting now.
‘Yes, yes,’ I said very insistently; given the situation, they ended up signing. ‘Don’t get upset,’ I went on. ‘The first thing we’re going to do is to make an inventory of all stocks held in each of your workshops, and ascertain the financial balance of each. To those showing a profit, we’ll pay 10 per cent of the surplus shown every three months; for those showing a loss – bad luck! Moreover, each one of you will stay on as a union member and be employed as a technician with the corresponding wage.’
By now they were beginning to get a bit more enthusiastic. I encouraged them even more with a fantasy of the future in which I told them we would soon be building houses of glass, all the street signs would be of glass, and so on. ‘You’ve never thought of things like that, but this is what we’re going to do.’
‘Hombre, yes, yes.’ They left the meeting quite content in the end. And that’s how we collectivized the plate glass business …
*
Revolutions move fast: ‘Time is as different as when you’ve got a toothache; you don’t eat, hardly sleep, you forget where you’ve been, what you’ve been doing. Days are like hours, and months like days … ’ a POUM militant recalled. The rush of the present into the future does not shed the weight of the past: half a century of anarchist anti-state ideology did not disappear overnight. The bourgeois Catalan state had virtually disappeared, the central Madrid state also.12 Everywhere in the Popular Front zone, committees had taken the organization of local affairs into their own hands. Fragmented, differentiated, localized, the revolutionary committees ignored state power, drove past it as though it were a corpse; lifeless it indeed appeared, but it was still breathing.
—In forty-eight hours, the relation of forces in Catalonia, in particular Barcelona, changed completely. The state disappeared. President Companys expressed the predicament: to be able to carry out his functions he needed people who functioned. He pressed a button to call his secretary; the bell didn’t ring, the electricity wasn’t working. He went to the door to speak to his secretary; he wasn’t there. Then he discovered that even had the bell worked, even had his secretary been there to call the head of department he wanted to see, the order would have been meaningless: the departmental head wasn’t there. The whole administration had crumbled …
Jaume MIRAVITLLES, an ex-member of the dissident communist workers’ and peasants’ bloc, BOC (Bloc Obrer i Camperol), was now a member of the Esquerra, the republican party of the petty bourgeoisie which had dominated Catalan politics under the republic. The sight of the ‘human fauna’ which had suddenly appeared on the streets of Barcelona, which didn’t speak Catalan, which was armed, astounded him. Where had it come from? He saw a man with a cannon, the red and black anarchist flag attached, which he paraded behind a horse through the streets as though it were his own, shouting ‘Long live anarchy!’ Barcelona was not only a major industrial city but also a Mediterranean port.
—It bred a lumpen proletariat which now suddenly appeared and overwhelmed the CNT and even the FAI. The latter couldn’t disavow these people because they represented the anarchists’ very philosophy: the spontaneity of the masses. The Madrid government had made the fatal mistake of discharging all soldiers, and there was no way of getting them back to the barracks. The anarchists prevented them when they tried. What could be done? …
An idea was mooted to bring in all the guardia civil units which remained in the villages. The anarchists had got wind of the plan: he and Tarradellas for the Generalitat met Durruti, García Oliver, Mariano Vázquez of the CNT; they came armed.
—‘If you try bringing in the guardia civil we shall call a general strike immediately; there will be a massacre of the Generalitat and Esquerra leaders.’ They were well aware that the plan was aimed at them, that the force would be used to fight them, to win back control of the situation, and they were prepared to carry out their threat. Naturally, the order to the guardia civil was never given …
MIRAVITLLES was appointed one of his party’s three representatives on the Central Committee of the Anti-Fascist Militias of Catalonia. This was the committee the libertarian leaders had agreed to join during their famous conversation with Companys on 20 July 1936 when he offered them power. A day after that meeting, he decreed the committee into existence, asserting thereby a power the Generalitat did not currently exercise but which it had not abdicated either.13
The anti-fascist militia committee was installed in the bullet-scarred Nautical Institute by the port, whose windows had been smashed in the street fighting of 19 July. Five libertarians, five republicans, five ‘marxists’14 took their seats, all appointed by their respective organizations. MIRAVITLLES was appointed the committee’s secretary-general.
—The title meant very little; my role was that of coordinator. Regrettably, there was very little I could coordinate …
In almost permanent session, the committee controlled virtually everything in Barcelona (though by no means the whole of Catalonia): transport, communications, hospitals, supplies, the militias, security.
—From an organizational point of view it was chaotic – it couldn’t not be. Each ‘secretary’ did more or less what he liked; although we were in constant session, we were never all there at the same time. Very few agreements were reached in committee, the latter being simply presented with faits accomplis.
The building we were in was a sort of barricade with walls – the authentic atmosphere the libertarians liked. I don’t remember when I ate or slept, and I certainly don’t have the impression that I ever left the building to go home. I slept on a mattress on the floor or in a chair, and the same was true of the others. We were all sleep-walkers …
The libertarians, he thought, believed they had taken power through the committee – and from within that was how it appeared. They came to the meetings wearing bandoliers stuffed full of cartridges and laid their pistols or sub-machine-guns out in front of them. Thumping the table, they’d shout: ‘This is how things are going to be done now – with cojones! – You’re a lot of petty bourgeois. You’re trying to hold back the revolution instead of giving it impetus. Everything is working fine without any bourgeois at all, the factories are running as normal.’
—They initiated a series of reforms which a
ppeared infantile – I’d always doubted the possibility of anarchist society functioning – and it astonished us when it then seemed to function. It was all being done in a mood of hallucinatory exaltation. The libertarians controlled the most important ‘secretariats’ – but in reality power lay still in the streets. The committee functioned spontaneously, dealing with problems as they arose. It would give me pleasure to say that it represented a new form of organization through which the masses – such an abstract concept – were able to express themselves; but it didn’t. It was an expedient to fill a gap; regrettably, it was not up to the historical demands made of it …
The committee realized it was unable to handle all the calls made on it and set up a supplies committee to provision the city. The CNT chose Joan DOMENECH, the glassworkers’ union secretary, as one of its representatives. ‘But I don’t know anything about supplies. I’m a glassworker.’ ‘That doesn’t matter, get over to the committee that’s being set up,’ replied ‘Marianet’, the CNT regional committee secretary.
He was shown into a small room, with benches and pupils’ desks. Representatives from the other parties and organizations – the new committee was to have the same representation as the militia committee – were already waiting. After some time the door opened, and Abad de Santillán, FAI representative on the main committee, came in. Leaning against the teacher’s desk, he announced that they were the supplies committee.
—‘From now on you have got to provision the militia columns, the hospitals, the entire population. Good evening. Oh yes,’ he added, as an afterthought, ‘by the day after tomorrow, before noon, we need 5,000 cold rations for the militia column which is going to launch an attack on the Aragon front. You’ll organize that. Buenas tardes’ …
The men looked at each other; they had twenty-four hours. Where to start? A man sitting at the teacher’s desk pulled a piece of paper from his pocket and began to read out a series of instructions.
—‘Where do you come from?’ I asked. I’ve always been a bit strange in my ways, and the one thing none of us had come there expecting was that anyone was going to give us orders on how to carry out our task, even if we hadn’t the slightest idea ourselves. ‘I’m from the POUM,’ he said. ‘Well, you know the first thing you’re going to do? No! Then I’ll tell you. You’re going to come and sit here with the rest of us and then we’ll decide who’s going to head this committee’ …
DOMENECH found himself elected to the post. Since it was already 10 p.m. they decided to adjourn until early the next morning when they went to find the man appointed by the Esquerra to take charge of the Barcelona food markets.
—‘We’re the revolutionary supplies committee,’ I told him. He looked rather frightened. People were being taken for paseos by then. ‘Oh, oh – But I’ve been appointed by the town hall.’ ‘That’s all right,’ I replied. ‘You can be our committee’s president, if you like, and I’ll be your secretary, and these companions will help us.’ He was happy with the arrangement and turned up, in suit and tie, at 9 a.m. or 10 a.m. By then, dressed in overalls, I’d been at work for two or three hours. After a fortnight he hadn’t the faintest idea of what was going on and said there wasn’t much point in his continuing. I told him he could go to France to organize food purchases for us, and he went – never to return …
DOMENECH’s first major problem was to control the available stocks of food. The revolution provided him with the means. When the armed workers’ patrols, which had been set up by the militia committee, ‘expropriated’ a shop full of hams – ‘coño, it was they who had made the revolution after all’ – the owner would in despair report to the supplies committee; and the latter would send out men to put a sign on the shop: ‘Requisitioned by the Supplies Committee’ or ‘Taken Over by the CNT’. This prevented further looting of the shop, and kept it functioning with foodstuffs provided by the committee. A special warehouse was set up to provision the workers’ patrols so that they should no longer ‘confiscate’ food, as were other warehouses for the militia, the hospitals, the poor. None the less, large queues formed outside the committee offices. DOMENECH took charge, posting a man at the door with strict instructions to allow only one person in at a time.
—As soon as each one came in he or she would start off on a long, involved story. A man whose wife had just given birth was asking for a chicken, but he couldn’t get to the point. ‘Tell me only what you want,’ I’d shout at him, like a general. ‘A chicken.’ ‘Take this bit of paper. Go to window so-and-so. They’ll give you one. Next!’ And so it went on until in an hour or so I’d got through the whole queue …
The supplies committee abolished money – ‘a very anarchist idea’ – and in its place organized a barter system: food supplies from the villages in exchange for manufactured goods from the city. Lists were sent out from Barcelona showing the surpluses of shirts, sandals, silk stockings, etc., that were available in exchange for chick-peas, olive oil, wheat or whatever surplus agricultural produce existed. Wheat and meat were DOMENECH’s two major concerns, for Catalonia was self-sufficient in neither, and much of the wheat had to come from outside, especially from Aragon. But exchanges were arranged with villages as far distant as Andalusia.
—They’d say they wanted shoes. We’d get hold of the respective CNT delegate for the shoe industry and say: ‘Tomorrow, we need 700 pairs of shoes.’ And tomorrow they’d be there. We had confidence in the delegates who were running the industries they had taken over; we didn’t need reports, stock lists, statistics. Good faith guided the people, that was what counted. In those first months there wasn’t this whole state apparatus that could have provided such figures anyway – it was a revolutionary situation. And even if we had tried to get accounts and that sort of thing, our people in the factories probably wouldn’t have known how to make them out. Good faith was worth a lot more …
The exchanges were based on the different products’ market value pre-war. So many pairs of shoes were worth so much, that much would buy a certain quantity of wheat, so many pairs of shoes equalled so much wheat. The circulation of money, not money as the expression of exchange value, was abolished.
—In two to three months, we had exchanged about 60 million pesetas’ [about £1,500,000] worth of goods without anyone touching any money. We organized foreign trade in the same way. We needed more wheat. We packed up all the surplus onions, champagne – which was of no use to us in war – Valencia oranges and other products and dispatched a freighter to Odessa with them. I put the consignment in the hands of one of those adventurers who always appear in time of war and whom I thought capable of organizing it. He took over a freighter that was in the port and sailed down the coast as far as Andalusia, buying whatever we knew the USSR could use; when the ship was well laden, he set sail.
By this time Antonov-Ovsëenko, the old Bolshevik who led the storming of the Winter Palace, had been sent as Soviet consul here. He viewed our experiment favourably, I believe. ‘Catalonia will become the new Ukraine of Spain,’ I said in a speech in his presence; to be truthful, I didn’t know what the Ukraine really was, but it impressed him. Thereafter we used to exchange views, and he told me what produce the USSR needed and I what we needed, and it was on this basis that the first consignments of supplies were exchanged. We got seven ships loaded with excellent wheat, meat, condensed milk and other foodstuffs in return. The first to arrive, in October, was given a monumental welcome. The transactions for all seven were arranged by me; I kept the receipts made out in Russian and French. But the credit for the other six ships went to the communists, as I’ll explain …
Jaume MIRAVITLLES continued to be amazed that such a system could work at all. Prices were controlled, people had money to buy things. ‘This system functions,’ he said to Josep Tarradellas, his Esquerra colleague on the militia committee.
—What we didn’t realize was that the stocks which the bourgeoisie had left were being consumed in making it work. As soon as they were used up the situation became
tragic, the dream began to fail …
But this was still in the future; at that moment his and his colleagues’ attention was focused on a more immediately dramatic situation: the assassinations that were taking place.
—Day after day, we found ourselves on the committee repeating: ‘Why these assassinations? A man was killed last night who belonged to the Esquerra. Why? Another man has been assassinated simply because his sister was a nun. Why?’ It was a terrible mistake they were making. They saw the bourgeoisie as their main enemy. They called a man a fascist simply because he went to mass. President Companys told them they were drowning the revolution in blood. ‘We shall lose the war for this reason.’ The libertarians went pale. When Companys from time to time put in an appearance at the committee, we of his party stood up; the communists half rose, the libertarians remained solidly seated. ‘Tell Companys not to come here again,’ Durruti said to me and Tarradellas. ‘If he does, I’ll fill him full of bullets … ’
* * *
An Eye for an Eye, a Tooth for a Tooth!
If it is true that our comrades have been shot in Saragossa on the orders of that uniformed bandit Cabanellas, Goded and all the fascist scum will pay with their lives …
Solidaridad Obrera, CNT (Barcelona, 24 July 1936)
* * *
COMRADES … The revolution must not be allowed to drown us in blood! Conscious justice, yes! Assassins, never.
CNT statement (Barcelona, end of July 1936)
* * *
The most original aspect of the revolution we are making is the role assigned to the petty bourgeoisie … This modest social stratum, which at the beginning of the proletarian revolution felt itself seriously threatened, has been calmed by our display of understanding and respect.
Solidaridad Obrera, CNT (Barcelona, 15 November 1936)
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