The factory, moreover, never received orders for the sort of war material it was best suited to produce – large tanks, for example. No new machine tools were brought in; the factory’s existing press forge, its milling machines and lathes were not suited for producing shells, grenades and anti-submarine depth charges. With adequate equipment, production might have reached 75 per cent of its potential, ROIG felt.
At the end of the first year, he helped draw up the collective’s balance sheet, managing to strike a balance which showed neither profit nor loss.
—In fact, if the true position had been stated, it would have shown a financial disaster. The Generalitat was paying the wages against our invoiced deliveries; the only condition was that the latter should more or less cover the former. At the end of the war, when the owners took over again, they drew up new accounts which showed that the factory had made a loss of nine million pesetas in the three years. At the time that represented nearly 50 per cent of the company’s subscribed capital …
Self-management, he came to think, could work only if the whole of collectivized industry, from the extractive to the transformation process, functioned properly; and this, patently, was not the case. It was only after the central government took over La Maquinista in November 1937, that things began to pick up, in his view. A young, intelligent engineer was appointed as manager, more fitters and foundrymen were taken on, and some new installations opened. ‘But I never trusted the military specialists who arrived with the government take-over. I was convinced they weren’t putting all their technical expertise at our disposal –’23
In all truth, he felt, it was only when the old board of directors took over at the end of the war that the factory began to produce at pre-war levels again. The mass of the workers remained in the factory.
—There weren’t more than one hundred who had been true revolutionaries and who fled. Once they were gone, the others did what no doubt they had wanted to do all along: work and earn their living. Within a few days of the end of the war the factory was working full blast …
*
In all, at least 2,000 industrial and commercial collectives were legalized and registered under the decree, according to the computations of Albert PEREZ-BARO. Despite the fact that the decree applied to all Catalonia, the idea that what was happening in Barcelona was necessarily happening elsewhere was erroneous. ‘Those of us who didn’t live in Barcelona at the time have always complained that historians have concentrated their attention on the capital and deduced that in places like Tarragona, Reus, Valls they were the same. They weren’t,’ commented Josep SOLE BARBERA, a lawyer and PSUC militant in Reus, a town of some 30,000 inhabitants in Tarragona province. An antifascist militia committee, on which he served, had been set up to replace the townhall; but there the comparison with Barcelona ended, for the CNT was not the dominant force or even the dominant trade union locally. An autonomous union organization, Federación Obrera Local, outnumbered both CNT and UGT and depended on neither. The Spanish socialist party, which almost immediately merged into the PSUC, followed by the POUM, which had ‘gained considerable support by attacking the Popular Front as a reformist alliance’, were the strongest political forces on the left at the start of the war.
—The relative equilibrium amongst the different forces, largely due to the local union federation, made Reus a very different place from Barcelona; a much more balanced place, with a much greater spirit of unity. The same was true wherever a certain equilibrium existed. Tensions certainly arose, the dominance of the CNT in Barcelona provoked a reaction which was reflected even in Reus – but it was not the determining political factor in the town …
There were important metal-working and textile factories in the town employing more than 100 workers which, under the collectivization decree, should have been collectivized.
—But none of them were. All industrial enterprises had workers’ control committees – but the decree wasn’t put into effect. The situation was so lax, so many decrees were issued that no one obeyed. In Catalonia generally, outside Barcelona, I’d say there were a great many industries which, though falling under the decree’s scope, refused to collectivize and remained under workers’ control24 …
Neither Barcelona’s revolutionary writ, nor that of the Generalitat, extended to all points of Catalonia. There was Popular Front local government in Reus; CNT–FAI domination in near-by Tarragona; trade-union government, without any petty bourgeois representation or link with the Generalitat, in Lérida under POUM inspiration; even in a CNT-dominated industrial town like Badalona, next door to Barcelona, the revolutionary process had its distinctive characteristics.
Within a few days of the military uprising, the town’s thirty-seven textile mills were working again; the CNT textile union, of which Josep COSTA, a specialist foreman, was secretary, had ordered owners and managers to return to their posts which all but half a dozen had done.
—At that moment, we hadn’t the slightest intention of taking over, expropriating or collectivizing any factory. We thought the uprising would be rapidly crushed and nothing much would change. What was the good of getting excited about collectivizing if, in the end, everything was going to revert to the former, capitalist, system? …
None the less, the union started to give orders – ‘hardly in the anarcho-syndicalist tradition, it’s true, but these were exceptional times’ – to the union committee in each mill to set up a control committee of technicians, staff and workers to oversee and control production in agreement with management. A ‘war tax’ was imposed by the union on the profitable firms to support the 500 local men who had gone to the front and to help finance raw material purchases for the economically weaker firms which, it soon became clear, formed the majority; only half a dozen plants in the town, with its population of about 80,000, were profitable. Despite the fact that collectivization in Barcelona 8 km away was in full swing, the union didn’t follow the capital’s example.
—We didn’t see the Barcelona textile collectives as models for our experience. Individual collectivized mills acted there from the beginning as though they were completely autonomous units, marketing their own products as they could and paying little heed to the general situation. It caused a horrific problem. It was a sort of popular capitalism …
The Badalona textile union leaders hesitated, unable to make up their minds to collectivize. The decree was still a long way from being made law. The news from the front was hardly encouraging; in the rearguard raw materials were already becoming short, inflation was setting in. Internationally, capitalism would not allow a repeat in Spain of the Russian revolution, COSTA was convinced. On top of everything, the divisions in the anti-fascist camp were apparent from the first days and – if not isolated and crushed by international intervention – the libertarian revolution would be jeopardized by political infighting. What was the point then of pushing the revolution forward?
—I’m sure there were thousands of CNT militants like me who saw that the whole thing made no sense; but the pressure came from the base, from the mass of workers who had been imbued for years with the CNT’s revolutionary ideas. We militants couldn’t now make a joke of the ideology and practice to emancipate the working class we had professed for so long. The revolution was like a dog shaking itself when it comes out of the water – the Spanish people shaking itself free of 400 years’ injustice. There was nothing we militants could do but go ahead or shoot ourselves …
The final decision came when they heard news of the repression taking place in the insurgent zone. ‘The assassinations, executions, showed us that capitalism was playing its last card – and we had to pre-empt it. We had to destroy that capitalism.’ And so began an experiment that was perhaps the closest to a pure syndicalist revolution. The dangers of the big ‘union trust’ as of the atomized collective were avoided. Each collective was run by its elected management, sold its own production, received the proceeds and, as most of them were working for the war industry, got i
ts own orders. But everything each mill did was reported to the union, which charted progress and kept statistics. If the union felt that a particular factory was not acting in the best interests of the collectivized industry as a whole, the enterprise was informed and asked to change course. ‘The union operated more as a socialist control of collectivized industry than as a direct hierarchized executive.’
Piece-work was abolished, the working week reduced to forty hours (and soon to much less because of raw material shortages), the ‘first social security system in Spain’ created: full retirement pay, free medical care, free medicines, sick pay, maternity pay (two days’ pay off work for the husband when his wife was giving birth), a clinic for specialist services and childbirth – the scheme being financed by a levy per worker in each collective that had the funds. An unemployment fund was created, and a proportion of those out of work were found jobs outside the textile industry.
—The one thing the union had to ensure was that workers were able to earn their weekly wage. We set up a compensation fund to permit the economically weaker collectives to pay their workers, the amount each collective contributed being in direct proportion to the number of workers employed …
There were about a dozen mills employing over 100 workers, the largest with nearly 1,000. Under the decree, the remaining two dozen firms already collectivized should have reverted to workers’ control.25 ‘But, frankly, we didn’t worry too much about the decree: the control committees carried out the union’s instructions and the mills were as good as collectivized as far as we were concerned.’
Production dropped between 20 per cent and 30 per cent as a result of the reduction in work hours, but rose again ‘after explanation that the success of self-management depended on each worker’. As supplies of raw materials decreased – before the war all but 2 per cent of the nearly 100 million kilos of cotton needed for the Catalan textile industry had to be imported – an attempt was made to rationalize the Badalona industry, closing down two or three of the small, uneconomic mills and distributing the workforce among the larger plants.
—We couldn’t do more. Although such rationalizations were legal under the decree, we ran into the opposition of the UGT, which invariably invoked the Generalitat, especially after the PSUC’s secretary-general Comorera became economics councillor. The latter could block rationalization very easily: at least half the collectives, within two years of the start of the war, had mortgaged themselves to the Generalitat in return for the payment of their wages. The Generalitat appointed an inspector and, to all intents and purposes, took over the factory. The collectives lost the economic freedom they had won at the beginning. We did everything we could to limit the numbers going to the ‘pawn bank’, but in those difficult circumstances we couldn’t do enough …
From the start he had believed that collectivization efforts were doomed to fail. Like many other CNT militants, he felt, he would have been prepared to try to reverse the revolutionary current, but to do so required two prerequisites:
—The guarantee of a steady and continuous flow of arms from a capitalist country; and that we stopped being so touchy about our principles and showed ourselves willing to make compromises. The first was the most important. Aid from a capitalist country would have brought a change in our thinking because we would have had to assure that nation that we were acting in the defence of democracy – and nothing more. But no such aid was forthcoming; the only arms being received came from the Soviet Union, and this served to reinforce the communist party’s position …
The dilemma which faced the anarcho-syndicalists, in consequence, was whether to press ahead with the libertarian revolution come what might, or renegue on it; the latter, as he saw it, meant tying the movement hand and foot to the communist party and the Soviet Union.
—The latter would have been like cutting out our guts, emptying our brains, denying everything we had been preaching to the masses. It would have meant handing back the factories to their owners and saying, ‘Nothing has happened –’ This was precisely the communist party’s political, if not social, objective in order to show the world that what was being fought for in Spain was a matter of a political regime, not a change of social order. When the communist party saw it was unable to dominate us, it set out to destroy us. What it didn’t realize was that in destroying us, it was destroying itself. We were doing what the communists should have been doing; in destroying us it was destroying a strong, powerful, dynamic mass base …
*
The CNT soon became aware of the pitfalls and errors of collectivization, especially in the textile industry in Barcelona. In February 1937, four months after the decree’s approval, a joint CNT–UGT textile union conference agreed that experience had already demonstrated that collectivization of individual plants had been mistaken, and that it was necessary to proceed rapidly towards a total socialization of the industry if ownership of the means of production was not once more to lead to man’s exploitation of man. The works councils did not in practice know what to do with the means of production and lacked a plan for the whole industry; as far as the market was concerned, the decree had changed none of the basic capitalist defects ‘except that whereas before it was the owners who competed amongst themselves it is now the workers’. Without the General Industrial Councils – the supreme body envisaged by the decree for each industry, which were not set up until nine months after the decree was approved – it was impossible to rationalize, cut out competition between collectives within the same industry and ‘overcome the existing disorientation which exists in all branches of the industry’. Three months later, in May, a CNT commission castigated the ‘exorbitant desire to collectivize everything, especially enterprises with monetary reserves, which has awoken among the masses a utilitarian and petty bourgeois spirit … Collectives have thought only of their debts, thus creating an unbalanced state of finance in other enterprises.’26
The woodworkers’ union weighed in with its criticism of the state of affairs, alleging that, while small, insolvent workshops were left to struggle as best they could, the collectivization of profitable enterprises was leading to ‘nothing other than the creation of two classes; the new rich and the eternal poor. We refuse the idea that there should be rich and poor collectives. And that is the real problem of collectivization.’ In the non-collectivized sector, the union maintained, workers’ control committees were responsible for a multitude of errors which included: raising wages and reducing working hours in the midst of a war; accepting ‘vast sums’ of money against imaginary capital assets from the Generalitat’s ‘pawn bank’ – ‘millions of pesetas spent on non-production which has ruined the economy’; the creation of an enormous number of bureaucratic parasites, and committees which were often ‘a thousand times more materialistic than the bourgeoisie’ in their commercial dealings with the socialized woodworking industry.27
While thousands of workers contributed their wage increases to the support of the militias at the front, others of less ideological commitment came to consider that self-management or workers’ control meant the guarantee solely of their weekly wages. In the large private sector under workers’ control, this led to an unexpected result. Credit virtually dried up.
—The control committees, which had been given the right of joint signature with the enterprise’s owner, or representative, to all money transactions, frequently refused to sign anything not strictly connected with wages. They refused credit. The result was that all dealings between enterprises were very soon reduced to cash transactions, recalled Albert PEREZ-BARO …
These difficulties might have been palliated if the industrial and commercial credit fund foreseen by the decree had been rapidly set up,28 for one of its purposes was to channel funds from the wealthier to the poorer collectives. It was to be financed by a levy of 50 per cent of a collective’s profits.
—This truly revolutionary measure – though rarely, if ever, applied – wasn’t well received by large numbers of workers, pro
ving, unfortunately, that their understanding of the scope of collectivization was very limited. Only a minority understood that collectivization meant the return to society of what, historically, had been appropriated by the capitalists …
Generalization about the collectives in their many and varied forms is impossible.29 Some worked well, others badly. They were hampered by a great number of factors: no party or organization supported them (or at least the October decree) wholeheartedly, and some attempted to reverse the experiment. The decree itself – partly due to political in-fighting – failed to provide, either quickly enough or at all, the structure (General Industrial Councils, the credit fund) which would have articulated the collective enterprise into a coherent, planned totality; and added to all this was the unremitting official hostility of the central government to the experience which it saw as yet one more instance of Catalonia’s determination to ‘go it alone’.
The experiment lasted too short a time, in PEREZ-BARO’S opinion, to be able to make a final judgement. As secretary of the decree’s application commission, he was well-placed to have an overall view.
—But I believe that had it been allowed to continue, without being pulled either to left or right, and had further agreement been reached by common consent of the political parties and trade union organizations, the collectivized regime would have succeeded …
—The working class showed a splendid sense of initiative, agreed Sebastiá CLARA, old CNT militant and treintista leader. But that isn’t to say there weren’t stupid collectivizations. Take the barber shops. What in reality was being collectivized? A pair of scissors, a razor, a couple of barber’s chairs. And what was the result? All those small owners who on their own would have supported the fight against fascism, now turned against us. Worse than having the enemy in front of you is the enemy in your midst. These people joined the fifth column, the GEPCI,30 and it was the CNT which paid the bill …
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