Blood of Spain_An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War

by Ronald Fraser

  The opportunity missed in Catalonia was seized by the libertarians in Aragon: the power vacuum they found there (the three provincial capitals and the corresponding state apparatus being in nationalist hands) was filled by a CNT council. ROYO was called to attend a plenary session in Bujaraloz, Durruti’s headquarters, in September 1936 to consider the matter and draw up a report on the projected council’s constitution. He was convinced of the need for such a body because, in his view, Aragon was being treated like a colony by the Catalans and Valencians. A representative of the Catalan Generalitat had toured Aragon making propaganda when the first age-groups were called up, as though Aragon belonged to Catalonia. ‘If we were going to have to belong to a government, we didn’t want the Generalitat, we preferred to belong to the central government.’38

  The CNT column leaders, most of them Catalans, opposed the council’s creation.

  —They spoke threateningly of the rearguard, were hostile. They acted more like thugs than idealists. Arms brutalize men, I thought. The union representatives from the villages weren’t going to have any say, it seemed. Then Durruti arrived. ‘I have waited all these years for the revolution. Now it has happened. The 14,000 men in my column are with me, I believe, because they agree with me. My men and I are at the disposal of the villages and their unions … ’ I wasn’t a Durruti supporter, I’m nobody’s man, but at that moment he was perfect. He shut up all the other column leaders …

  The CNT Council of Aragon became the only libertarian-dominated governing body in the Popular Front zone.39 Its propaganda delegate, Juan ZAFON, the sole Catalan serving on a body whose councillors were appointed – ‘counter to CNT tradition in which all posts were elected by the base; but we were at war and had to improvise’ – saw it as the regulatory body of the collectives rather than as a government. Its aim was to foster further collectivization ‘as part of the war effort’; at the same time, the collectives were an attempt to create a model, an example for the future of what, once the war was won, a new libertarian society would be like.40 But first the war had to be won: he and his companions agreed with Durruti’s famous statement.

  —While engaged in our revolutionary experiment, all our propaganda concentrated on the defence of the legally constituted republican government. That might seem contradictory. We didn’t think so. The people had expressed their will in the 1936 elections and we had to defend that will, while collectivization served both the war effort and our vision of the future. We were attempting to put into practice a libertarian communism about which, it’s sad to say, none of us really knew anything …

  The free, independent municipality, the collective which abolished the exploitation of man by man, the federal structure which linked each village at district and regional level and, after supplying the needs of the villages and fronts, channelled what surplus was produced to the council, which in turn could sell or exchange it with other regions or abroad; ‘all this had been talked and written about, but it had been no more than a slogan until then.’

  MAS DE LAS MATAS (Teruel)

  With a population of 2,300, Mas de las Matas was a relatively prosperous village of small- and medium-holding peasants. Whereas other lower Aragonese villages lived off wheat and olive crops, Mas de las Matas enjoyed extensive irrigated lands along the river Guadalope which grew large vegetable and fruit crops. More important: the dry land was good and retained moisture; even in a dry year the wheat crop did not fail as it did once every five years or so in other villages. Yet more important, the land was well divided, everyone having some irrigated as well as dry land. ‘Equality had real meaning here,’ in the words of a self-defined right-winger. ‘There was no one who could live without working, no one who had to spend his life seeking a day’s wage.’ Surprisingly, perhaps, the village was an anarcho-syndicalist stronghold which, in the third of the pre-war libertarian uprisings (December 1933), declared for libertarian communism, forced the guardia civil to surrender, burnt local archives and the land registry. The rising was quickly subdued and about 130 villagers arrested and gaoled.

  At the start of the military uprising, many libertarians, on instructions from the CNT regional committee, left the village for the fortified town of Morella and from there they joined the Carod column as it advanced into their region. Among them was a twenty-six-year-old cabinet-maker who had joined the CNT in Barcelona, participated in the December rising and was to become one of the protagonists of collectivization. Before reaching their native village, which offered no resistance, Ernesto MARGELI and his companions had taken an important decision: no one was to be imprisoned, let alone shot. MARGELI had never conceived of revolution as meaning that ‘half the world has to be killed so that the other half can live. Just because they imprisoned us was no reason for imprisoning them.’ For every person killed the revolution would make half a dozen irreconcilable enemies out of their family and friends, he told his companions.

  In the village they formed an Anti-Fascist committee, composed half of CNT militants (all elected and including a communist party member) and half of republicans who had a long history in the village. But as more militia forces continued to arrive, as the problem of supplying them became more acute, and as the disorganization of the initial period did not give way to anything better, several CNT members, including MARGELI, realized that something had to be done.

  —We were living through a revolutionary moment; it had fallen into our hands. Even if the people weren’t prepared, we had to make the revolution now …

  They called an assembly at which they proposed that a collective be formed. It was something they had always talked about. They explained that if the land were collectivized, if all the different plots were combined, production could be rationalized and increased with less effort through the use of machinery. They spoke of their revolutionary ideals to transform society; they wanted ‘the purest form of anarchism’. The assembly agreed.

  It was in September, about six weeks after the start of the war. By then collectives had been formed in other villages, predominantly north of the Ebro river; the example was catching on. The nearly 200 CNT members in Mas de las Matas were morally obliged to join the collective. It meant handing over their lands and tools, livestock (with the exception of the one or two pigs each family fattened yearly), stocks of wheat and other produce. The collectivized land was divided into some twenty sectors and each sector was assigned to one work group of about a dozen men, neighbours from the same street, who elected their own delegate or leader. Money was immediately abolished. All produce from collectivized land was to go to ‘the pile’ for communal consumption; each would produce according to his ability, each would consume according to his need.

  —I was so enthusiastic, so fanatic that I took everything in my parents’ house – all the grain stocks, the dozen head of sheep, even the silver coins – and handed them into the collective, recalled Sevilla PASTOR, of the libertarian youth, who came from a prosperous peasant family which owned two houses and more land than they could work with family labour alone. So you can see I wasn’t in the CNT to defend my daily wage; I was in it for idealistic reasons. My parents weren’t as convinced as I, that’s for sure …

  MARGELI put his cabinet-maker’s workshop with all the tools and machinery into the collective, for what had been set up was not just an agricultural collective.

  —No, no! It was a general village collective. We set up a collective carpenters’ shop in a garage on the outskirts of the village where the seven or eight local carpenters made furniture for the collective, carried out repairs – all done free on a collectivist’s house – and worked on building projects with the masons who were also collectivized. We built a barber’s shop where all the village barbers worked, a collectivized butcher’s and so on …

  Elected secretary of the collective, MARGELI argued from the start against obliging republican party members to join the collective. Something of the sort had been done in neighbouring Alcorisa and it had turned out badly and h
ad to be reversed. None the less, there remained a problem: because landholdings were so numerous and the plots so scattered, rationalization of landwork was made difficult if many peasants refused to join. Machinery could not be introduced unless there was extensive cultivation.

  —Our next move was a mistake – the biggest of all, I believe now. We obliged all right-wingers to join. Coerced them morally, not physically, but coerced them all the same …

  An ugly incident had occurred shortly before. A band of armed men had arrived from Alcañiz, the nearest large town, to ‘clean up the village in the name of the CNT’. Its first action was to arrest the local Anti-Fascist committee and take its members, including MARGELI, to the townhall were they were locked up. The committee was accused of ‘cowardice’ for having refused a purge. Within a couple of hours, six men had been shot on the road leading from the village. There was absolutely no justification for this action, in MARGELI’S opinion; the assassinated men had not risen against them, had submitted with more or less good grace to the committee’s orders. ‘Their assassination was an utterly un-anarchist mode of behaviour which, unfortunately, not all the companions were sufficiently educated to understand.’ The following day the Anti-Fascist committee called a village assembly and offered its resignation en bloc for having been unable to prevent the assassinations which it unanimously condemned. Several villagers spoke, expressing confidence in the committee, which finally received a unanimous vote of confidence.

  The incident, following on the burning of the church by ‘uncontrollables’ on the day the village was taken by the returning libertarians, posed a considerable threat. Who could tell if it might not be repeated (as it nearly was, though few were to know, by some villagers serving in the Carod column; alerted, the committee was able to take preventive action); violence was everywhere. Within a short time, 2,000 of the village’s 2,300 inhabitants had joined the collective.

  Lázaro MARTIN’S father and older brother were among the six assassinated men. One of the better-off village families, they owned 2 hectares of irrigated and 12 of dry land; his father had belonged to an agrarian syndicate – ‘the syndicate of order’ as it was locally known – before the war. But it wasn’t politics that caused the assassinations, thought MARTIN; it was personal hatreds, vendettas. ‘It was enough for one family to be better off than the next for there to be envy.’ When collectivization occurred, MARTIN had to join. At first he worked in the collective store, later on the land.

  —At first we all thought, ‘Well, all right, we’ll obey the new order. If things change later, so much the better.’ In time of war you’ve got to expect this sort of thing. It’s bad luck if your land is expropriated, there’s not much good worrying about it. If that was all that had been at stake we would have put up with it and worked in the collective without any problem, as though nothing had really changed. But taking lives was another matter. It was their big mistake. If it hadn’t been for the assassinations, one wouldn’t have known there was a war …

  Even if the conservative peasantry was willing to accept collectivization as a ‘war measure’, MARGELI remained convinced that the collectives should have been voluntary. The question of the division of the land could have been solved by agreements on exchanging peasant holdings so that the collectivists’ lands formed a continuous whole. People who were forced to join did not work with pleasure, worked as little as possible, he observed. The peasant was very individualistic; he had to be persuaded by example.

  Another of the collectivist experiments, the most advanced, was also proving unviable. If it was possible for a person to produce according to his ability, it was not possible for people to be left to consume according to their needs. The leap from a capitalist society of scarcity to a communist society of abundance, where neither communism not abundance existed, was doomed.

  —People were throwing away bread because it was free, remembered Macario ROYO, the CNT leader, who was a native of Mas de las Matas but spent most of the war on tasks outside the village. It was tragic for us who had aspired to a libertarian society, but we had to face it. Wastage couldn’t be permitted. We had to put a wage on people’s work and a price on the products. We had in fact to introduce rationing …

  While some collectives introduced their own paper money (having abolished national currency) and paid a family wage to the collectivists, others worked a form of rationing without money. Both were designed to control consumption. The elimination of money, or its substitution by currency valueless outside the collective, was aimed at preventing the accumulation of capital in private hands. While assuming that money above a certain quantity was synonymous with capital, and while overlooking the elasticity of choice money provided, these collectives did not ignore the actual money value of their products: pre-war prices were used to fix the value of produce exchanged between them; and also the value of some products supplied by the collectives to their members.

  —We thought that by abolishing money we would cure most ills, observed MARGELI. From an early age, we had read in anarchist thinkers that money was the root of all evil. But we had no idea of the difficulties it would cause – it turned out to be one of the biggest mistakes. And having different money in each village only added to the muddle …

  Mas de las Matas did not introduce money but a rationing system. Each family had its ration card: 100 grams of meat, 500 grams of bread, so much sugar, rice, wine per head per day free. Each adult male was allocated a clothing quota of 200 pesetas per head per annum, which could not all be spent at once. In MARGELI’S recollection, the system was unwieldy but worked; a family wage would have been preferable.41 According to MARTIN, the right-wing youth who worked for some time in the collective store, the rations were set too high at the start and, as the stocks which had been taken over were depleted, the rations had to be reduced. None the less, the villagers did not go hungry.

  All the taverns were closed. ‘We libertarians were always hostile to bars because they were the source of vice, arguments and fights,’ recalled Sevilla PASTOR, who had handed over his parents’ possessions. Only the large room in the CNT centre was left open and there people could drink coffee or non-alcoholic beverages. Wine was distributed as part of the ration for private consumption at home. Gambling was suppressed.

  PASTOR was happier working in the collective than he had ever been. A large part of the happiness stemmed from knowing that he and his companions were working for the good of the village as a whole. There were others, he realized, who didn’t share his enthusiasm because they felt that instead of working for themselves they were working for others. But the committed libertarian youth worked harder in the collective than before the war, believing that the war demanded it of them.

  —We knew we weren’t prepared to achieve our real goal – libertarian communism. The collective’s purpose was to increase production for the war effort and to prevent speculation and private profit. Remember, all trade was in private hands at the start of the war. Now the collective controlled it. When the war was won, we thought, we would continue on our collectivist path, but everyone would be free to decide whether they wanted to remain in it or not …

  Although he bore hatred for those who had killed his father and brother, Lázaro MARTIN found that to live and work in the collective was ‘no hardship at all’. He found himself working a good deal less hard than before when he had been used to going out to the fields at day-break, and returning at sunset.

  —But now we didn’t go out until the sun was shining overhead, and we stopped a lot earlier too. Each work group looked after its own interests up to a point. If we were weeding a melon patch, each of us would have a melon or two, with our delegate’s knowledge. It was like everything: ideals are one thing and personal interests another42 …

  But it was the republicans and socialists who did not join the collective whom he pitied most. As long as they worked their land on their own they had no problems, but if they as much as got their brother or a neighbour to len
d them a hand, then the trouble started. The ‘individualists’ were supposed to have only as much land as they could work on their own, and any infringement by calling on outside labour was leapt on.

  Another medium-holding peasant’s son, Jaime AVILA, who found himself in the collective, had no objection to the work – ‘it’s an obligation to work anyway’ – and was pleased to have got a new jacket and a pair of trousers from the collective store, something he had not been able to afford before. Nor did he find it unduly strange to work without pay. In a great many farmers’ homes sons did not get a wage.

  —Nor did their parents, of course. Until the crop was sold they didn’t get any money for their work. That was country life; work wasn’t valued in terms of a daily wage. When there’s a job to do, country people go out and do it. And that’s what we did. It wasn’t a regime of terror, you couldn’t call it that. All the same, we saw things we had never seen before. What sort of things? People being shot, some after trial and some without. And so everybody had to do what they said …

  If the experiment had continued longer, he felt, they would have seen if it really worked. What would happen when the stocks ran out? Could they be replenished? As it happened, the wheat harvest in Aragon that year had been very good, and the olive crop to come was similarly excellent. As long as there was food and clothing people were more or less content. But in a bad year? He felt that in the work groups there was always a shirker, and as soon as another saw him taking things easy the example spread. Why should one work harder than another?

  —Not that it was better to work on your own, I don’t mean that, but it was necessary to have a stimulus, a drive – and that was what was missing. We people here weren’t of the quality needed to make the experiment work; more than mutual respect was necessary for that. And meanwhile what was happening in the rest of the nation? In one place one lot was in charge, and across the lines another lot. The strongest would force the weakest to give up their system and impose their own. It was a mix-up and a mess I never understood …