Blood of Spain

by Ronald Fraser

—There was I, the leading village collectivist, and I couldn’t even persuade my father. He said the collectivists didn’t work properly, the leaders didn’t know how to do things. He preferred to stay outside working his own land like a slave. People said it did the collective’s reputation a lot of harm. I’d tell him the collective had produced more wheat that year than the village had ever harvested before. He’d reply that the year had been a specially good one. I couldn’t oblige him to join; we weren’t living under a dictatorship …

  As it was, considering that it was a war economy, the collectives were very successful, he thought. Still the majority of the collectives were imposed, not spontaneous, for the revolution was not being made.

  —We had no option. Our sole objective was to combat fascism and win the war, nothing else. Of course, obligatory collectivization caused many problems with smallholders. With time, years of propaganda perhaps, we could have shown them that with less expenditure of energy they could produce more. Cooperatives wouldn’t have served the same purpose: the land would still have been scattered in plots, time would have been wasted going from one to the other – they weren’t the correct economic solution …

  The collective matched Mas de las Matas in acquiring a threshing machine by an exchange of olive oil. Moreover, the village administered the local lignite mines, which the miners had taken over, and sold coal to Barcelona, thereby securing a useful source of revenue to procure food supplies the collective itself did not produce. But one problem which afflicted the collectivization experiment almost everywhere was vividly demonstrated in Alloza: the shortage of administrators. Most of the people appointed to the collective’s committees were right-wingers, Angel NAVARRO recalled.

  —The man who ran the accounts and did all the paper work, who bought and sold on the collective’s behalf, was a falangista. When the nationalists took the village they made him mayor. What else could you expect? We, the poor, had only one concern before the war: to go out and work the land, while the others, with education, ran the village …

  * * *

  34. The three Aragonese provinces produced 7.6 per cent by value of Spain’s total cereal crops pre-war. Of this Saragossa province produced over half, Huesca just over a quarter and Teruel slightly more than one fifth. The best wheat-growing lands of Saragossa were in nationalist hands. Yields in Huesca province, especially in the Monegros steppe lands, were notorious for their tremendous fluctuations depending on rainfall; while Teruel, one of the most sparsely populated provinces of Spain, which sowed one third of Aragon’s pre-war cereal lands, harvested only 21 per cent of the total crop (by value), an indication of the quality of the land. See E. Malefakis, Agrarian Reform and Peasant Revolution in Spain, p. 45, and Bases documentales, vol. 7, p. 344; also F. Mintz, L’Autogestion dans l’Espagne révolutionnaire (Paris, 1970), p. 99.

  35. Mintz, op. cit., p. 102. Less than half of Aragon’s 1 million population lived in the three quarters of the region under republican control.

  36. Medium holdings (10 to 100 hectares) covered about one quarter, and smallholdings just over one half of the land, representing about 1 per cent and 98 per cent of the total holdings respectively. See Malefakis, op. cit., pp. 16–17 (although it should be noted that his figures include Logroño).

  37. The contradiction between the use of force and libertarian ideals was, ROYO believed, one that had always existed in anarchism. ‘To establish libertarian communism means making the revolution; revolutions are made only by force. Everything that is imposed by force has to be maintained by force. The outcome may be communism but it isn’t libertarian. If it were, it wouldn’t be communist, for the simple reason that the mass of the people aren’t communist. Libertarian communism could be established only if the majority of the people already supported communism and then started to organize that communism freely –’

  38. Juan ZAFON (see below) maintained that the Generalitat’s propaganda machine under Jaume Miravitlles rejected his approach to coordinate their propaganda to which the central government had readily agreed, and stated that it would continue to send its propaganda and cinema lorries to Aragon. ZAFON threatened to expropriate them if they were sent. There were also protests when the militia columns requisitioned foodstuffs, livestock, etc. which threatened to ‘ruin the whole region’ (Lorenzo, Los anarquistas españoles y el poder, p. 120).

  39. In exchange for government recognition, it admitted Popular Front parties (with the exception of the POUM) in November 1936, though the CNT retained majority representation.

  40. Perhaps because rural collectivization was being pursued more rapidly and extensively in Aragon than in the heartland of anarcho-syndicalism itself, Catalan militants tended to stress the war communism aspect of collectivization, while Aragonese militants emphasized the social revolutionary aims.

  41. Adopted in many rural collectives, the family wage consisted of a basic day-wage for all working family heads, plus a wage for each dependant which varied according to whether he or she had reached working age or not. The wages were paid in the collective’s currency. (See also p. 367 n.)

  42. Some fifteen months later, martin managed to cross to the nationalist lines; after three nights in the mountains, a guide led a party of eighteen across.

  43. Contemporary anarchist accounts of the Mas de las Matas collective are contained in G. Leval, Collectives in the Spanish Revolution (London, 1975); and A. Souchy and Bauer, Entre los campesinos de Aragón (Valencia, 1937). No such accounts exist for the following collective in Alloza.

  Militancies 11

  SATURNINO CAROD

  CNT column leader

  The problem preoccupied him: so many of the villagers in the collectivization experiment were illiterate that, when he went to see how a collective was working, they often did not understand what he meant when he asked if they were keeping accounts. They replied that if they needed something for the village they got hold of a lorry – often one lent them by the Carod column – and made an exchange with another village.

  —It seemed almost impossible to get them to understand the need for accounts; such bureaucratic necessities were opposed to the romantic, idealistic ways they were pursuing in all good faith …

  He had argued against the abolition of money which was based on a confusion between money and capital; the error was rapidly illustrated when the villages had to print their own. And he was insistent on the need for accounting.

  —‘Yes, yes, we’re keeping accounts now as you suggested,’ they’d tell me, producing a bit of wire bent in the shape of a hook on which there were stuck cigarette packets, wrappings from other products or the margins of newspapers, which bore the marks of several lines or strokes. In some cases, where there was someone who knew how to sign his name, you’d perhaps find the word Alcañiz as well. But never the article or products to which these scratches corresponded. Even more typical was a bamboo cane split down the middle. Both sides were notched in such a manner as to indicate what had been bought and sold, and the buyer’s and seller’s half fitted together exactly. Despite their lack of formal education, and thanks to their natural intelligence, these people achieved very considerable successes. In organizing work no one could better them, for they knew, from their long experience of cultivating the land, what had to be done and how …

  He himself, the son of a landless day-labourer in the small village of Moneva (close to his column headquarters now at Muniesa), had been illiterate until his early twenties. At six, he had begun earning his keep; at times, to help keep his eleven brothers and sisters alive, he had been driven to begging or to looking for snails, edible fungi, herbs or whatever else he could find. At the age of twelve he was a ploughman, working for a peasant with a medium-sized holding; later, he followed the wheat harvest across the Castilian plain, reaping with a sickle. By the age of eighteen he had left the village, as so many Aragonese were forced to do. It was the end of the First World War. He crossed France; at the German border the sight of the enormous qua
ntities of marks being exchanged for a few pesetas frightened him, and he turned back. Reaching Barcelona finally, he became a building labourer; and there, again like so many Aragonese migrants, he joined the CNT. He attended union meetings, spoke but vanished when there was any question of being elected to a union post. Maurín, then of the CNT, later secretary-general of the POUM, discovered the reason and suggested to his workmates that they cut out the headlines of newspapers to teach him to form syllables and pronounce them. It was during the worst era of governmental and employers’ repression of the CNT in Barcelona,44 and soon he had to flee to France. His group had been on its way to shoot an employer when they met a priest who was bearing the viaticum and was accompanied by police.

  —We refused to kneel, as was the custom, or to obey police orders. The employer we were after was a very bad man who refused to recognize the union or any of the workers’ demands. Our refusal to obey police orders resulted in a shoot-out and we all scattered …

  When an amnesty was declared on the republic’s proclamation, he returned from exile to live and work in Saragossa. Soon elected to the CNT regional committee, he made it a condition of his acceptance that the committee undertake peasant organization. He had always felt himself a peasant; but he knew that within the CNT, despite its massive rural strength in Andalusia, there was hostility, not only – and understandably – towards the landowner but towards the small peasant as a property owner. As propaganda delegate, he began a series of public meetings in the villages of Aragon to organize amongst the smallholders.

  His opposition to total collectivization at the start of the war stemmed from his awareness that many of the people fighting in his column were smallholders, and that a great number of different tendencies were represented: republicans, socialists, liberals, Catholics, libertarians. To collectivize, he argued at a CNT regional plenum, might provoke dissension amongst the non-libertarian peasantry and the combatants at the front. He knew only too well how the smallholder clung to his plot of land.

  —It’s a part of his being, he’s a slave to it. To deprive him of it is like tearing his heart from his body. He must not be forced to give it up to join a collective …

  Collectives, formed from land belonging to owners who had fled and from communal land, should act as an example for the future; they should help, rather than hinder, individualist smallholders so that they would be encouraged by their example;45 meanwhile, the small peasantry should form cooperatives.

  But once collectives had formed, it was his duty to support them in every way possible. He found himself saddled with the responsibility of conducting the war in his sector and of helping the collectives in the rear. He used his influence with his companions in the rear to ensure that the peasants’ needs were attended to rapidly and unbureaucratically; loaned the collectives lorries and technicians; and made a special trip to talk to the CNT’s national committee secretary, Mariano Vázquez, to suggest that book-keepers or people capable of keeping accounts should be sent to the collectives.

  Convinced that capitalism spawned the all-enveloping megalopolis at the expense of the stagnant, isolated rural village, and that neither represented the post-capitalist future, he set out to realize a revolutionary vision of his own: the creation of an agro-town. The aim was both economic and social. By creating a viable rural economy it would be possible to prevent migration from villages whose existence no longer corresponded to historical necessity but where people continued to eke out a miserable existence, deprived of the most elementary means of satisfying their human needs.

  He chose the village of Muniesa, where he had his headquarters, because it had good road communications, and started with the building of farm installations to rear chickens and rabbits, and later pigs and cattle. Bricklayers and carpenters serving in his column worked at their respective trades while ordinary militiamen and a handful of peasants worked as labourers.

  —Next to the farm was a flour mill on which I spent the equivalent of nearly 200,000 pesetas converting and re-equipping it to mill the grains grown in the region. My aim was that all the mill’s waste product should be used as foodstuff for the farm’s livestock. Soon we had two large blocks completed for rabbit-breeding, and an incubator with a capacity of hatching 24,000 chicks every twenty-one days …

  Here the peasantry from the outlying areas would find work. But it was necessary to create jobs for women, since their migration often led to that of the men. He planned to develop the region’s bee-keeping and the use of honey in the manufacture of sweets and turrones, which would provide female employment, as would a small meat-canning factory.

  —Despite everything that is said about the liberation of women, one must take into account woman’s social role, particularly as mother, and protect her from the sort of work that requires great strength. It was not right that a single woman who needed to earn her living had to work the land like a man …

  The social purpose of the agro-town was to provide the educational and recreational facilities so sorely missing in the small villages: not only schools, but theatres, cinemas, libraries. At the same time he bore in mind that the larger the city or town, the less intimate were the relations between its inhabitants and the greater the inhumanity.

  —Solidarity should come first in all human societies. In a town of 15,000 to 30,000 inhabitants, everybody more or less knows each other, and each respects his neighbour and is willing to lend a hand when the latter needs it …

  The CNT national committee sent foreign technicians to see what he was doing. They valued the project at 9 million pesetas, he recalled.

  —We had spent hardly anything. Then they asked me for the plans. I said I was sorry. They assured me they wouldn’t use them for any other purpose than to study what was being done. Finally, after some to-ing and fro-ing, I said: ‘No one can see the plans because they’re here – in my head.’ And that was the truth. Whenever I went to the farm I would say to the bricklayers: ‘Lay me out a section here of such and such a size; we’re going to use it for chicken-rearing.’ The general ideas were mine but they were carried out by skilled workmen, militiamen and peasants.

  Perhaps we were dreamers. Utopians. Yes, all of us; but remember that even liberalism was a Utopia until it was realized, and then socialism appeared the utopia. We were (and remain) convinced that one day the utopia of ours – the most utopian of all perhaps – will be realized; for if it isn’t, man will not be content …

  * * *

  Others were as concerned as Carod at the lack of trained administrators. Félix CARRASQUER, the FAI schoolteacher who, on the day of the military uprising, had been expounding his plan for a CNT people’s school in Barcelona, put his idea into practice in his native Aragon. The boarding school he started on his own initiative in Monzón for some sixty students between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, all peasants’ children who had been elected by their respective collectives for the six-month courses, was to prepare them practically and theoretically for administering collectives.

  Every Sunday, the school travelled to different villages. CARRASQUER noticed the difference between those which had spontaneously collectivized and the others. In the former, where the CNT had existed before and the small peasantry was used to running its own holdings, things went well. But where the collectives were formed by CNT militiamen or where CNT militants had forced people to collectivize, things were often very different. He was called on more than one occasion to settle disputes.

  —‘You have got to leave people free to decide what they want to do,’ I reminded the fanatical anarcho-syndicalists who insisted on forcing smallholders into the collective. But it wasn’t a widespread problem, because there weren’t more than twenty or so villages where collectivization was total and no one was allowed to remain outside …

  In February 1937, rather tardily in comparison with Catalonia or the Levant, the CNT held an extraordinary congress in Caspe to discuss the creation of an Aragonese regional federation of collectives, CAR
RASQUER attended as a delegate; he was convinced of the need for a federation. Each collective had by now got into the habit of sending its own produce in its own lorry to Barcelona or somewhere to exchange it for other products. Without a federation, there could be no solidarity, no communitarian sense of self-management. But it was a long hard battle before the congress could be persuaded.

  —Knowing our militants, knowing that each would want to make his speech, I let them all talk first. Then I got up. The ‘cantonalism’ of the collectives spelt the ruin of the movement, I said. A rich collective could live well, a poor collective would have difficulty feeding its members. ‘Is that communism? No, it’s the very opposite. Whose fault is it if one village has good land and the next has poor?’ The congress was persuaded of the need for a regional federation. Then I outlined the need for a national federation. ‘But you’ve just persuaded us to create a regional federation and now you want to destroy it,’ was the reaction I got. It illustrated one of the problems the movement confronted … 46

  *

  Self-managed autonomy could, in a collective, turn into the autonomy of ‘managers’ over the ‘managed’. This, at least, was the experience of Fernando ARAGON and his wife Francisca, both staunch CNT supporters, in the important collective and district centre of Angüés, close behind the lines on the Huesca front in northern Aragon. A smallholder and day-labourer, ARAGON had joined the CNT nearly twenty years earlier in Barcelona, and would have given his life to defend it, because for as long as he could remember he had hated the bourgeoisie. ‘A stone on the road isn’t worth much, is it? Well, I’ll tell you: I wouldn’t even give a stone to a bourgeois –’

  The collective set up in Angüés was total; no one was allowed to remain outside. He welcomed the collective’s creation. Wasn’t this the moment they had been waiting for for so long? When at last they were rid of the bourgeoisie, especially the half-dozen landowners with as much as 200 hectares each of the best land, who had been grinding him and his fellow workers into the dust.