Juan ANDRADE, of the POUM executive, was highly critical of the whole experiment. The anarcho-syndicalist workers had made themselves the owners of everything they collectivized; the collectives were treated as private, not social, property. Socialization, as practised by CNT unions, was no more than trade union capitalism.
—Although it wasn’t immediately apparent, the economy as run by the CNT was a disaster. Had it gone on like that, there would have been enormous problems later, with great disparities of wages and new social classes being formed. We also wanted to collectivize, but quite differently, so that the country’s resources were administered socially, not as individual property. The sort of mentality which believes that the revolution is for the immediate benefit of a particular sector of the working class, and not for the proletariat as a whole, always surfaces in a revolution, as I realized in the first days of the war in Madrid …
One of the first men killed on the Madrid front had been a POUM militant, and his funeral provided the occasion for an enormous demonstration. Before it, the CNT undertakers’ union presented the POUM with its bill. The younger POUM militants took the bill to ANDRADE in amazement. He called in the undertakers’ representatives.
—‘What’s this? You want to collect for your services while men are dying at the front, eh?’ I looked at the bill. ‘Moreover, you’ve raised your prices, this is very expensive.’ ‘Yes,’ the man agreed, ‘we want to make improvements –’ I refused to pay and when, later, two members of the union’s committee turned up to press their case, we threw them out. But the example made me reflect on a particular working-class attitude to the revolution …
Joan GRIJALBO, bank clerk and UGT representative on the Economics Council, was more sanguine. Had the collectives functioned as badly, had there been as much disorder as was sometimes claimed, the war would not have lasted thirty-two months. The Catalan UGT was not opposed to collectivization as such; but it was resolutely opposed, like the PSUC, to trade union (or autonomous working-class) power.
The Council’s youngest member at twenty-five, GRIJALBO was less impressed by the libertarians’ casual approach to administrative matters. On one occasion, when the Generalitat lacked sufficient ready funds to pay wages and was preparing to send someone to the Bank of Spain in Cartagena, Abad de Santillán, the CNT economics councillor, told him to make out an IOU and go to the CNT to draw the 500,000 pesetas needed.
—There was the CNT lending the Generalitat money! An illustration of the anarchists’ way of doing things, their mistaken concept of administration. Moreover, if the CNT had half a million pesetas in its coffers to lend, it meant they had a lot more – and the money must have come from confiscations …
But apart from the CNT’s attitude to such matters, an attempt was constantly made to make people aware of their responsibilities in managing the collectivized economy. At least 5,000 company directors and managers were present, he estimated, at a huge meeting to celebrate approval of the collectivization decree. Given the very grave economic problems brought on by the war, he felt that the collective experience was fairly successful.
Though the collectives’ achievements cannot be meaningfully quantified, some of the economic problems they – and their workers – were living through can be given statistical expression. As the indices opposite show, overall Catalan production fell in the first year of the war by 30 per cent, and in the cotton-working sector of the textile industry by twice as much. Overall unemployment (complete and partial) rose by nearly a quarter in the first year, and this despite the military mobilization decreed in September 1936.31 The cost of living quadrupled in just over two years; wages (as far as can be ascertained) only doubled. Inevitably, the working class bore the brunt of the civil war. The relatively frequent insistence on – and pride in – the fact that the collectives managed to pay their workers wages even when there was no work must be seen in this context. Industrial prices rose less sharply than the cost of living and at a slower pace than the wholesale raw material index, suggesting that collectives heeded the Economics Council and later a special price commission. It also meant they generated little or no apparent surplus, and even less so if they were paying ‘unproductive’ wages. This in turn meant that the money due to go to the credit fund to finance, and eliminate disparities between, collectives was impaired.
Despite the errors in practice, the collectivization decree (widely believed in Catalonia to have influenced the later, post-war Yugoslav experience) stands as a revolutionary monument in industrial self-management. Through every difficulty, including bitter internecine political struggle, the Catalan working class kept collectivized production going for thirty months of war.
CATALAN INDICES 1936–91
1. Source: Bricall, op. cit. Industrial production, prices and unemployment have been recomputed to give the January–June average as base.
2. Included to show inflation increase immediately prior to May events (see pp. 374–83).
The question that must be asked of the experiment is not, however, the usual one of whether the collectives were a revolutionary success, but whether they were the adequate revolutionary response to the needs of the moment: winning the war. Was it necessary to take over more than large industrial and commercial enterprises, transport, the banks in order to consolidate the revolution and win the war? Was the Catalan revolution serving itself and the war effort by allowing, within a collectivized system, the continued existence of a market economy, lack of controls, a variety of types of self-management, and large numbers of deficitary collectives? By failing to ensure the revolutionary redistribution of labour, the rapid rationalization of the textile industry (where, after a year, partial unemployment had risen from 6,000 to 36,000)? So staunch a defender of the collectivization decree as Albert PEREZ-BARO addressed himself to the essence of these questions seven months after the start of the revolution. Laying the blame on all sectors for the difficulties encountered, he did not spare the workers themselves:
‘ … the immense majority of workers have sinned by their indiscipline; production has fallen in an alarming manner and in many instances has plummeted; the distance from the front has meant that the workers have not experienced the war with the necessary intensity. The former discipline, born of managerial coercion, is missing, and has not been replaced, owing to the lack of class-consciousness, by a self-imposed discipline in benefit of the collectivity. In an infantile manner the workers have come to believe that everything was already won … when in reality the real social revolution begins precisely in the period of constructing the Economy’ … 32
A harsh answer; but then these questions were not often asked by those who maintained that the war and revolution were inseparable, and only too often answered – with a blank negative – by those who believed that the revolution must wait on the successful outcome of the war. The polarization of that polemic obscured many real problems.33
* * *
Fuego, fuego,
Entrar a Oviedo
Coger a Aranda
Y echarlo al agua
Fire, fire,
Enter Oviedo
Catch Aranda
And throw him in the water
Children’s song in Gijón sung to the tune of a chocolate advertising jingle
COMRADES: The Spanish working class, at war and at work, is forging a Spain which must be fundamentally different from that which we had to live under before the fascist uprising … We know, however, that this is not the moment to try to introduce a total social revolution … either of a libertarian communist or state-run nature. This statement in no way means that proletarian pressure to achieve the COMPLETE SOCIAL REVOLUTION must be postponed … for the process has already entered its final stage and is guaranteed by the Alliance of our two Trade Unions.
In accordance with the above, we recognize as part of the present historic reality the following forms of property:
A. Nationalized
B. State-controlled or State-run
<
br /> C. Cooperative
D. Private
Asturian UGT-CNT pact(14 June 1937)
* * *
* * *
Asturianos: A fellow-Asturian, a lover of the Fatherland and the Republic, I, Colonel Aranda, send you my warm greetings. I beg all of you to cooperate in this labour of saving the Fatherland; let every man pick up a rifle, let every man do his duty … We must put an end, once and for all, to this era of innumerable crimes perpetrated under cover of a love for Democracy and the Republic which their authors do not feel …
Colonel Aranda (First radio speech, Oviedo, 19 July 1936)
* * *
1. Three separate juntas operated simultaneously in Guipúzcoa: the socialist-dominated junta of Eibar, the PNV militia command in Azpeitia and the Guipúzcoa defence junta under left-wing domination in San Sebastián. Relations between them were not always good, which did not contribute to military efficacy on this relatively small front (see Ortzi, Historia de Euzkadi: el nacionalismo vasco y ETA, Paris, 1975, p. 215).
2. M. de Irujo, La guerra civil en Euzkadi antes del estatuto (Bayonne, 1938, mimeographed), p. 60. The CNT made off with all the arms of the Loyola barracks, distrusting the PNV’s commitment to the war effort.
3. Unlike Catalonia, the Basque country had a pre-war arms industry, but no large stock of arms and ammunition to be seized from military dumps at the outbreak. Non-Intervention froze the supply of necessary raw materials to keep the existing arms factories producing fully. In August, the PNV seized the gold in the Bank of Spain in Bilbao and shipped some of it in fishing boats to France to purchase arms. In terms of heavy industry, however, Vizcaya, with all the resources of Bilbao’s steel-making behind it, enjoyed a considerable advantage over Catalonia.
4. See Points of Rupture, C.
5. Having a month earlier already annulled the take-over of all estates which had not yet been actually settled.
6. Juan Crespo’s uncle; see Militancies 5, pp. 171–4.
7. These took place in Salamanca as in Valladolid (p. 167); but fewer people are believed to have been shot in the former than in the latter.
8. The cry of the Foreign Legion. There is no written record of Unamuno’s speech. The best reconstruction is in E. Salcedo, Vida de don Miguel (Salamanca, 1964). VEGAS LATAPIE alone remembers Unamuno making an attack on the army, accusing it of having shot Dr José Rizal, leader of the Philippine independence movement. The protestant clergyman, Atilano Coco, was shot.
9. Unpublished letters from Unamuno to Quintín de Torre, dated 1 December and 13 December, quoted by courtesy of the Unamuno family.
10. This later became institutionalized as the ‘pawn bank’, through which the workers of deficitary enterprises received their wages in return for ‘pawning’ their company’s capital equipment and inventory to the Generalitat – a measure which resulted in giving the latter virtual control of the enterprise.
11. ‘Indeed, I have a letter from Abad de Santillán, who was to become the CNT’s economics councillor in the Generalitat after Fàbregas, in which he says: “I was an enemy of the [collectivization] decree because I considered it premature … It destroyed the autonomy and spontaneity of a work which (in its origins) was essentially popular … When I became councillor, I had no intention of taking into account or carrying out the decree; I intended to allow our great people to carry on the task as they best saw fit, according to their own inspiration”’ (PEREZ-BARO).
12. The UGT, for its part, proposed at the time the cooperative organization of owner-abandoned industry, workers’ control in the remainder of large industry, and the protection of the industrial and commercial petty bourgeoisie.
13. The minimum figure of 100 workers for obligatory collectivization was a compromise between the different positions.
14. For further discussion of the problem of foreign capital and collectivization, see Appendix A, p. 575.
15. See pp. 139–40.
16. And also the deferment of payment on all company purchases made prior to 28 July, the date on which the workers got the mill running. See A. Souchy and P. Folgare, ‘Raport sobre la actuación del comité central de la España Industrial’, in Colectivizaciones (Barcelona, 1937).
17. ‘I spent several hours in the España Industrial mill. A large number of the workers have spent the greater part of their working lives here and there is a sort of “mill-patriotism”. When I questioned them on the improvements they wanted, I almost always got the same general, vague answers: freedom for all, socialism, fraternity … Very few made other demands, even for cultural facilities.’ (H. E. Kaminski, Ceux de Barcelona, Paris, 1937.)
18. Their periodicity was raised at the second assembly in October 1936, held two and a half months after the first. The factory committee said no decision had been reached on this question, but that no grave matters having arisen, it had not considered it necessary to call an assembly earlier (see A. Souchy and P. Folgare, op. cit.).
19. Industrial federations had been approved by the CNT in 1931 but their creation was combated by anarchist elements within the union and only a handful existed at the outbreak of the war. See Points of Rupture, D.
20. Pérez-Baró, Trenta mesos de col·lectivisme a Catalunya, p. 87.
21. For the view of the continuous passage from capitalism to socialism via self-management, as structural to anarcho-syndicalist ideology, see Points of Rupture, D.
22. See J. Bricall, Política econòmica de la Generalitat, p. 289.
23. The Catalan war industries became one of the major points of friction between the Generalitat and the central government, which started taking over some isolated factories from the beginning of 1937. The conflict had been patent from the start of the war. In September 1936, the Generalitat asked that some of the munition-producing machinery from Toledo, threatened by the advancing Army of Africa, be transferred to Catalonia. Madrid’s reply was categoric: ‘Catalonia shall never make cartridges.’ (See Bricall, op. cit., p. 291; also, De Companys a Prieto, documentos sobre las indústrias de guerra de Cataluña, Buenos Aires, 1939.) In August 1938, the central government, then in Barcelona, took over the whole Catalan war industry, provoking a cabinet crisis in which the Catalan minister, supported by his Basque colleague, resigned. Earlier, the Generalitat had refused to allow central government engineers and civil servants to set foot in its war factories. The take-over of La Maquinista led to considerable workers’ unrest. In reply to a questionnaire issued by the Generalitat to the collective, the works council made no bones that there had been a decline in production which, six months later, was beginning to pick up (see Contestaciones al questionari que ens ha estat adrecat per la Generalitat relacionat amb la requisa dels nostres talleres per la subscretaria d’armament del ministeri de defensa nacional, mimeographed, Barcelona, May 1938).
24. Another decree not put into effect in Reus was that issued by the POUM justice councillor, Andreu Nin, setting up Popular Tribunals. ‘There was no need, I had the situation pretty well in hand,’ explained SOLE BARBERA, who had been appointed judge of the main court. ‘Within seventy-two hours of my taking over, the revolutionary tribunal which had been set up in the first days was dissolved, I had appointed a new prison director, and was shortly releasing many of those who had been arrested.’
25. Only three mills had been originally left out, two because they were foreign-owned and one because the majority UGT opted to retain workers’ control. ‘I believe the Barcelona CNT told us not to expropriate the Swiss and French mills which had raised their national flags’ (Josep COSTA).
26. A report of the February meeting in Balances para la historia (Barcelona, undated), mimeographed account of the Badalona experience; the May commission in J. Andrade, ‘L’Intervention des syndicats dans la révolution espagnole’, Confrontation Internationale, September–October 1949, cited in Broué and Temime, La Révolution et la guerre d’Espagne, P. 145.
27. CNT–FAI bulletin, 25 December 1936, cited in Peirats, La CNT en la revoluci
ón española, vol. 1, p. 325.
28. The reason for the failure to create the Fund, connected with the problem of compensation for expropriated enterprises, is explored in Appendix, A.
29. At least five types of self-management can be distinguished: the ‘individual’ collective (or ‘canton’, in the expression of the time); ‘socialization’ (in which the union ran the whole industry); ‘canton-socialization’ (as practised in the Badalona textile industry, for example); ‘canton-state control’ (as operated in La Maquinista and in much of the armaments industry); and finally, collectivization, as laid down in the October decree (which can best be described as the project of economically federated cantons closely controlled by General Councils for each industry). The fact that only the latter two types were ‘legal’ added to the complexities. Alongside the collectivized sector, private industry functioned under workers’ control.
30. The PSUC-organized trade union for the petty bourgeois entrepreneurs and artisans.
31. Complete unemployment dropped by some 10 per cent while partial unemployment doubled, owing mainly to the short-time working in the textile industry. It is worth recalling that the same phenomenon occurred (in a non-revolutionary context) in Britain during the first year of the Second World War, and that it took two more years before unemployment ceased to exist.
32. Prologue to a pamphlet, Col·lectivitzacions i control obrer (February 1937), cited in Pérez-Baró, Trenta mesos de col·lectivisme a Catalunya, Appendix 1, p. 191.
35. See pp. 323–7 below for this and the communist reaction to the libertarian revolution as a whole. In January 1938, eighteen months after the start of the revolution, the CNT at its Enlarged Economic Plenum in Valencia revised many of its previous postures. It agreed to differential salaries, a corps of factory inspectors who could sanction workers’ and works councils; the administrative centralization of all industries and agrarian collectives controlled by the CNT, and effective general planning by a CNT Economics Council; the creation of a syndical bank; the development of consumer cooperatives. The following month, in a pact with the UGT, it called for the nationalization of mines, railways, heavy industry, the banks, telecommunications and airlines. (CNT interpretation of nationalization meant that the state took over an industry and handed it to its workers to manage; the socialists interpreted it as meaning that the state ran the industry.) However, as was only too often the case, the CNT reaction came too late, and the resolutions, though representing an important ideological shift, remained consigned to paper (see Lorenzo, Los anarquistas españoles y el poder, p. 233).
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