—When we brought in the wheat crop – an excellent harvest because we had worked hard and it had rained at the right time – we knew we were right: all that grain which had been sown, reaped and threshed with our labour had previously gone to benefit the landowners who did nothing. How sad to think of what those landlords had been making out of us before; how happy we were now to see the fruit of our labour providing food for the collective, the whole village …
Three or four of the peasants with larger holdings tried to leave the collective, but the committee controlled all the sources of seed and fertilizer and there was nowhere, now that money had been abolished, where they could buy what they needed. They had to remain in. But they worked unwillingly, he observed: they hadn’t their hearts in it, the hopes he and his companions had for the future. But soon he saw that it was not only the reluctant peasants who had no desire to work: it was the twenty-odd members – ‘where three or four would have been enough’ – of the village committee. The younger men went round with pistols stuck in their waistbands, looking – ‘but not working’ – like revolutionaries. The older men labouring in the fields commented that amongst their number were several who could no longer work hard on the land but could do a committee job. (ARAGON excluded himself for he was illiterate, and he knew that on the committee it was necessary to have some learning.) But what was even worse was that the committee members were lining their pockets: all the best food ended up in their houses. The collective produced considerable quantities, all the village’s needs were met, except when the committee refused to distribute stocks. ARAGON’S wife, Francisca, had twins; they were expecting only one baby and lacked clothing. He went to the committee and explained his need.
—They turned me down. ‘If we give you anything, all the pregnant women will come begging.’ ‘Is this what the revolution is about?’ I said to them. I knew they could provide something, even if only a few bits and pieces of cloth. ‘Is this why we’re fighting the fascists? Is this why I’m working in the collective? To be refused a small request – a need for a newborn? Until I get clothes for the child, I won’t do another day’s work.’ They didn’t like it; they knew I had been in the CNT a long time. They gave in …
But that wasn’t the end. One of the twins fell ill with a kidney complaint. Having no faith in the local doctor, Francisca wanted to take the baby to a doctor in Barbastro, the nearest large town 30 km away. She went to the committee.
—There were always half a dozen of them there – men. There wasn’t a single woman member. They refused me transport, it was all needed for the front. They told me to walk. They had three or four cars they had expropriated from the bourgeoisie which they were always riding about in. I got angry and asked for money so that I could make my own way to Barbastro. They refused. ‘It was your idea to abolish money so that we should all be equal. What sort of equality is this? You ride round in cars when I need to take my child to the doctor.’ They still refused …
Her father had been a CNT militant, her first husband had been killed during a strike in Barcelona, she had helped her brother-in-law, a CNT member, to escape from a ship that was taking him and others to deportation after the great 1933 tram strike in Barcelona. But she wouldn’t have a single good word to say of the revolution as she lived it in Angüés. She lost both her twins – they caught measles and died.
—There was great discontent. The women talked about it. We went out to work in the fields – and it was right that we should. But why didn’t the wives of the committee members have to go? If things went on like this, we would have to get rid of the committee. I wanted to leave, but I couldn’t. We had no money, no means. Moreover, the committee had guards posted on the roads. It was terror, dictatorship … 47
—There was no way of getting rid of those committee members. They had the arms, recalled ARAGON. We couldn’t vote them out, they only called a general assembly when one of them got fed up and wanted to leave. Or else if there was something very important to decide. Of one thing I’m convinced. Had we won the war, we workers would have had to fight another to get rid of those sort of people who were only out for themselves. Another revolution, there was no other way. Until that was possible, I went on working, nothing could shake my faith in the collective itself. I would have fought and died to defend it, as we thought was going to be necessary when the communists came. For, despite everything, those were the best years of my life …
*
For detractors of the Aragon collectives, Fernando ARAGON’s experience was more or less typical; for supporters, exceptional if undeniable. As one of the few collectives where everyone was forced to join, it was certainly exceptional; total, it became, in this experience, totalitarian.48 At stake was an inner democracy which directly expressed the collective’s will. Arbitrary conduct by those elected could only be prevented by ensuring their immediate recall if they failed to carry out the majority will. Such recall was not built into the collective structure here or elsewhere; too much, in consequence, depended on the ‘good’ (or ‘bad’) faith of those in positions of responsibility.
—In trying to create their free society, the anarchists were obliged to use force. I’ve had peasants come up to me almost crying with rage, saying they weren’t against the collectives – ‘but they’ve taken everything from me and forced me into it and that’s dictatorship.’ At some of the assemblies I attended, men walked round armed, hands on pistols …
Antonio ROSEL, a communist foundryman who, thanks to the CNT, had managed to escape from Saragossa three months after the start of the war, visited villages in lower Aragon as a UGT delegate in the company of a CNT militant to sort out problems. (The two unions in Aragon had signed a ‘unity in action’ pact which included agreement to ‘help and stimulate’ freely constituted collectives while respecting the freedom of the smallholding peasantry.) The communist party, he stressed, was not opposed to collectives as such. Where a landowner had disappeared and his estate had been taken over by day-labourers who wanted to work it collectively, the party had no objection.
—If a whole village freely decided to form a collective, that was fine. The trouble was that anyone who knew lower Aragon knew only too well that no such thing would happen. The peasantry en masse would not freely opt for such a solution, they preferred cooperatives to collectives. It was different for the landless labourers. People had to be given a choice. But the anarchists wanted to impose their maximalist revolution right from the start – and among a peasantry that lacked the understanding and consciousness for such a revolution. It was an anarchist dictatorship …
ROSEL, who had started life as an anarchist, did not feel that he was a systematic detractor of anarchism. One day, when communism had been in existence a long time, the scientific basis for the advance to libertarian communism might appear. But not like this. Revolutionaries with real revolutionary awareness would have understood, he thought, that the revolution being imposed in Aragon was contrary not only to the peasants’ interests but to the interests of the war. It was obvious to him, as it was to the communist party, that the war had to be won first; then the revolution could be made. Not only were the anarchists trying to make the revolution first, detracting effort from the war, but the Council of Aragon, as an autonomous government, was prejudicial to the conduct of the war which required in his opinion a strong central government. ‘As a result, our differences with the anarchists were absolute.’
Absolute differences that were finally to be decided in blood. The core of the problem was to find an agrarian structure which ensured the peasantry’s allegiance to the anti-nationalist cause and the highest possible agricultural production. Was it collectivization – of often unwilling peasants whose allegiance might be lost but whose output could, theoretically, be rationalized and controlled? Or private enterprise, which assured the peasants’ allegiance (in as far as they felt any loyalty to a republic which had done precious little for them), but allowed them to hoard or abstract a portion of their cr
ops which reached the cities only through the black market?
Anarchist domination in Aragon, overthrown within thirteen months of the start of the war, did not last long enough to provide a conclusive answer. Production measured by only one year’s grain crops in a region of known yield fluctuations like Aragon could not be definitive evidence. (None the less, it should be noted that the sole wheat crop harvested in Aragon under collectivization – 1937 – showed an increase of 20 per cent over the previous year, which had been a good crop, while in Catalonia, where agrarian collectivization was less widespread, it fell by the same percentage.49 More significantly, land sown to wheat in Catalonia dropped by as much as 30 per cent in Lerida province and 25 per cent in Tarragona province in 1937 compared to the previous year.)50
*
The collectivization, carried out under the general cover, if not necessarily the direct agency, of CNT militia columns, represented a revolutionary minority’s attempt to control not only production but consumption for egalitarian purposes and the needs of the war. In this, agrarian collectives differed radically from industrial collectives which regulated production only. Long before rationing was imposed in Barcelona, Aragonese collectives – although benefiting from stocks of the recently gathered wheat harvest which served as their founding capital – had imposed it on themselves: a rationing which had a redistributive effect – overall, people ate better. Control limited inflation, private speculation and hoarding, and released surplus production. Despite the fact that the youth which formed the bulk of the revolutionary minority went to the front, productivity was maintained, if not increased. Schooling improved and cultural achievements dear to libertarian hearts were introduced. For the revolutionary minority a new world might well be dawning – a world of revolutionary conquests which mobilized them against the common enemy. But the other side of the balance sheet showed the costs.
The absence of a libertarian strategy in relation to the petty bourgeoisie was again evident. Coercing peasants into collectives not only ran counter to libertarian ideology, but was no way to ensure their loyalty; there were other ways of enforcing control on production and consumption.51 As many Aragonese libertarians came to recognize, the collectives functioned better when they became voluntary. The egalitarian control which resulted from collectivization was vitiated in part by its localism. While the latter provided a source of communal identity, localism ran counter to egalitarianism – ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ collectives co-existed – and prevented the emergence of an effective revolutionary power. (The attempt by the Council of Aragon to provide a coherent structure was not successful and, apart from other defects, represented a ‘localism’ writ large.) The utopian elements of the experiment, mainly the abolition of money, complicated matters. The arbitrariness of some committees indicated the limits of libertarian democracy which could only be overcome by elected and revocable delegates answerable to a general assembly. Thus even as a form of war communism, collectivization suffered from serious defects.
In the libertarians’ eyes, Aragon was to be the anarcho-syndicalist example to the world. This it might have become if the revolution in the rear had been capable of initiating and sustaining a revolutionary war at the front. Revolution and war would then have found their exemplary synthesis. This did not happen.52 The libertarian revolution did not prove itself in the only manner that could have guaranteed its success: by defeating the enemy, by sweeping him back.
*
The major struggle within the republican camp being what it was – the struggle for political dominance over the popular revolutionary movement – the anarcho-syndicalists could expect to come under attack in Aragon as elsewhere. The peasant question was one of the major areas of the communist party’s anti-libertarian offensive. From the beginning the party had adopted a totally distinct land policy. This was seen in the communist agricultural minister’s Agrarian Reform decree of October 1936, which expropriated for the state without compensation all land belonging to those involved in the military uprising. Small tenants on expropriated land were given the perpetual usufruct of their holdings within certain size limits. Where there were no small tenants, the usufruct was given to peasant and agricultural labourers’ organizations to work collectively or individually as the majority decided.53
The pre-war republic had failed to implement agrarian reform; within a month of joining the government, the communists had legislated it. Land for the peasantry fitted squarely into the historic phase of the bourgeois democratic revolution.
The party’s newspaper Frente Rojo, of Valencia, hailed the decree as ‘the most revolutionary measure taken since the military uprising’. What the paper overlooked was that this ‘most revolutionary measure’ had already in good part been taken by the day-labourers and militant peasants without waiting for any decree. Its real importance lay rather in the fact that it gave the peasants legal right to the land they had themselves seized, and was the only legislation giving de jure recognition throughout the Popular Front zone to a revolutionary conquest.
Application of the decree within the limits prescribed required, in the communist party’s view, a ‘firm and tenacious struggle against uncontrollable elements who, in the name of “revolution” and “libertarian communism”, were trying to submit the peasantry to a new oppression’.54 In deeming expropriable only those owners who had intervened in the military uprising, the decree did nothing about village caciques and labour-employing peasant owners who had intervened actively in the exploitation and repression of labourers and peasants pre-war but not in the uprising. Anarcho-syndicalists and the left-wing socialist Landworkers’ Federation bitterly criticized this lack, the latter in particular demanding that it be made good. The communist party was adamant in its refusal. The need to form a ‘rearguard of steel’, in Frente Rojo’s words, came down in reality to the defence of the right-wing as well as republican peasantry, despite the fact that communist protection of the former could only exacerbate friction at village level where memories were long. In place of the control, however defective, proposed by the libertarians of agrarian production and consumption, the communist party proposed peasant free enterprise within the limits of size of holding laid down by the decree.
Peasant realism – the acceptance (as evinced by smallholding peasants hostile to collectivization in Mas de las Matas and Alloza) that war inevitably brought controls and restrictions – suggested that communist polarization in defence of the peasantry was unnecessarily sharp; when it came to free enterprise, the peasantry would most adequately place its trust in the true capitalists on the other side of the lines.
From early 1937, there were clashes over collectivization, and deaths in Castile, the Levant, Catalonia. A particularly bloody incident occurred in January in La Fatarella, close by the Ebro river in Catalonia, in which some thirty peasants who had resisted collectivization were killed. In June, however, Vicente Uribe, communist agricultural minister, issued a decree declaring all rural collectives legal ‘during the current agricultural year’. This was necessary to ensure that agricultural work for the time of the year should be undertaken ‘as satisfactorily and speedily as possible’ and to avoid ‘economic failures which might chill the faith of the landworkers in the collective form of cultivation they chose freely when they confiscated the rebel exploiters’ lands’. The threat of undermining the collectives as the wheat harvest approached had evidently gone too far.55
* * *
Who are the enemies of the people? The enemies of the people are the fascists, the trotskyists and the uncontrollables.
José Díaz, secretary-general PCE (March 1937)
* * *
In short: what really concerns Stalin is not the fate of the Spanish or international proletariat, but the defence of his government by seeking alliances with some states against others.
La Batalla, POUM organ (Barcelona, November 1936)
* * *
* * *
One of the manoeuvres of the press which has
sold out to international fascism consists in the slander that the Soviet Union’s representatives are in fact conducting the republic’s foreign policy … La Batalla in its 24 November issue provides material for such fascist insinuations.
Press statement issued by the Soviet Consul General
(Barcelona, November 1936)
* * *
We anarchists have reached the limit of concessions. If we continue giving up ground, we shall within a short time be completely overwhelmed, and the revolution will be no more than a memory.
La Noche, libertarian (Barcelona, March 1937)
* * *
It is a very serious moment. The destiny of the proletariat is at stake. The P0UM has repeatedly voiced the alarm. Will it be heard by the other revolutionary organizations?
Andreu Nin, La Batalla (March 1937)
* * *
BARCELONA
The definitive clash between these opposing views came not in the countryside, but in Barcelona. The city had experienced neither the unity of purpose effected by enemy fire nor the bitter but glorious days of Madrid’s defence. In addition, Barcelona was farther from the front than any other major republican city. The libertarian revolution was running into resistance. The political tensions which arose throughout the spring of 1937 were increased by the first tastes of hardship. Food was in short supply and there were long bread queues. In April, women demonstrated in the streets against the cost of living, which had just risen a further 13 per cent on top of the increases that had already added nearly two thirds to the index since the start of the war. Never self-sufficient in food, Catalonia had a population density pre-war nearly double that of the whole of Spain; a massive influx of refugees, especially after the fall of Málaga in February 1937, had added to the pressure. With the nation’s largest city to feed, the question of food became critical. The CNT supply organization, which depended on an exchange system, had been suppressed by ‘a stroke of the pen’ when Joan Comorera, the PSUC leader, took over the portfolio in the Generalitat government in December 1936. ‘You fools,’ Joan DOMENECH, his CNT predecessor, told his companions, ‘don’t you realize that whoever fills men’s stomachs influences their minds? By this petty manoeuvre you’ve destroyed everything that we’ve created in the past months.’56
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