The Primo de Rivera Dictatorship

On September 13, 1923, General Miguel Primo de Rivera, the ^captain general of Catalonia (a post to which he had been appointed during the previous year), proclaimed himself military dictator of Spain, bringing to an end the parliamentary oligarchy Sagasta had labored to create in the 1870s.

The dictatorship was the culmination of a period of growing disenchantment with the army and with the role of the monarchy in the couritry’s political affairs. The army had proven itself grossly incompetent. Two years earlier, in June 1921, a large column in Spanish Morocco, advancing under the command of General Silvestre from Melilla to Alhucemas, was ambushed at Annual and virtually destroyed by a smaller force of Riff tribesmen. Ten thousand were killed, four thousand captured, and all the column’s equipment lost to the Riffs. In the following two weeks the Riffs took the Spanish-fortified posts at Monte Arrut, reaching the outskirts of Medilla before they were stopped. Silvestre’s advance, at first widely touted as a bold stroke against the Riffs, turned into a nightmarish route that threatened the Spanish presence in North Africa.

The entire country knew that the king was deeply implicated in these disasters. Silvestre, who perished in the Riff ambush, had been a protege of Alfonso. The king encouraged the advance in the hope that bold military successes in Morocco would strengthen his position against the Cortes. A damning dispatch from the monarch to Silvestre advised the ill-fated commander to “do as I tell you and pay no attention to the Minister of War, who is an imbecile.” Despite the lapse of two years between the Annual disaster and Primo’s pronundamiento, the out-cry over the affair continued unabated. Fed by rumors of corruption in the army, the public had become so uneasy that Sanchez de Toca, the Conservative premier, was replaced by a Liberal, Garcia Prieto, ending the reactionary politcal pattern that had been foisted on Spain since 1919. A new government of “liberal concentration” threatened to initiate sweeping reforms, including the democratization of the army and monarchy. While the Cortes was on summer vacation, a parliamentary commission of inquiry into the Moroccan defeats was sifting the details of army corruption, low troop morale, and the complicity of the king in the Annual defeat. Everyone recognized that when the Cortes reconvened in the autumn, the commission’s conclusions would essentially place the king and army on trial before public opinion.

Primo’s dictatorship brought this crisis to an end and deflected public attention from the corruption of the army and the ambitions of the monarchy to the “irresponsibility” of parlimentary government. A state of martial law was declared, suspending the Cortes and invoking censorship of the press. Political parties that continued to criticize the dictatorship were suppressed. By offefing the promise of “social peace” to a public weary of social instability, the dictator started his rule with a certain amount of political capital. To a Spain overfed with parlimentary crisis and corrupt politicians, Primo’s simple patriotism and amateurism became attractive qualities. A pleasure-loving Andalusian rake, Primo functioned by “intuition”; his speeches, gestures, and public behavior were marked by an embarrassing frankness which often mixed maudlin effusiveness with provincial canniness. “I have no experience in government,” he declared, not without honesty. “Our methods are as simple as they are ingenuous.” And he proved this by working at fits and starts at the most irregular hours, lecturing the Spaniards endlessly on a motley assortment of personal matters, and correcting social abuses suffered by “little people” when they came under his purview. This paternalistic style was displayed at the very outset of his regime when, in a grand gesture, he redeemed the pawn shop receipts of the Madrid poor with surpluses from his first budget.

To organize mass support for the dictatorship, Primo established a loose, rambling organization, the Patriotic Union (UP), which attacked individualism, democracy, and intellectualism, stressing obedience to social institutions and a pragmatic political philosophy. In the mid-1920s this program seemed like nothing less than fascism. Primo, in fact, expressed an admiration for Mussolini and adopted the external trappings and verbal style of the Italian dictator. His bluff soldierly traits and his regime’s denial of democratic process alienated Liberal opinion. Driven into exile more by disgust than by physical violence, Liberail and Republican dissidents slowly collected on the French side of the frontier and occupied themselves, with plots against the dictatorship. But Primo de Rivera was not a fascist and his UP was not a fascist movement. The dictatorship existed by sufferance of the monarchy and the army, which supported it as a last ditch alternative to the democratization of both institutions. The destiny of the monarchy was now tied to that of the dictatorship, for Alfonso would never be forgiven by Liberal opinion for validating Primo’s pronunciamiento by making the general into a premier. Ultimately, virtually all sections of the ruling class came to despise the new regime. Having assented to its establishment only in desperation, the more sophisticated reactionaries and monarchists were repelled by Primo’s-naivete, exasperated by his eccentricities, and humiliated by his crudeness.

More significant evidence of the regime’s nature is provided by its social policy—a policy that fixes it more in the Bonapartist than the fascist tradition. Primo had no objection to an organized labor movement, provided it posed no political challenges to his regime. His despotic benevolence allowed room for material concessions to the i#orking class, including government-sponsored medical services, modest wage increases, cheap housing, and a bureaucratic apparatus for labor arbitration. These policies found willing collaboration from the Spanish Socialist Party and the UGT. Following the logic of its reformist and opportunist traditions, Spanish Socialism, almost alone among the older political movements, worked*with the dictatorship. The UGT leaders entered the comites paritarios—the parity committees—in which labor, government, and employer representatives decided wage disputes. As salaried bureaucrats of the union, they found no difficulty in becoming salaried bureaucrats of the state. Largo Caballero, muting even his democratic scruples, acquiesced to the regime and became a councilor of state. The Socialist Party (which Primo genuinely admired) preserved it bureaucratic apparatus or, as Carr observes, its “modern organization with typewriters, secretaries, burial insurance, and the Madrid cooperative... The UGT even enjoyed a modest increase in membership, from 208,170 in December 1922 to 228,501 in December 1929, shortly before the fall of the dictatorship.

The Anarchists and the CNT were suppressed. Primo may have entertained some hope of splitting moderates from militants in the CNT; at any rate he waited for nearly a half year before suppressing the syndicalist labor union. Although moderate syndicalists such as Angel Pestana tried in various ways to accommodate themselves to the new state of affairs, the union’s implacable hostility to the dictatorship had been fixed at the very outset of Primo’s regime. On September 14, a day after Primo’s pronunciamiento, the CNT declared a general strike. In the absence of Socialist support and sufficient time for adequate preparation, the strike was easily suppressed by the military. Remarkably, despite this gesture, the union was still permitted to function openly.[33] On December 30, 1923, the Catalan Regional Confederation held a plenum at Granollers which attracted hundreds of workers; this was followed on May 4, 1924, by another plenum at Sabadell. On both occasions the u^nion reaffirmed its commitment to Anarchist principles. But time, now, was running out. Three days after the Sabadell plenum. Anarchist terrorists assassinated an onerous Barcelona police official, one Rogelio Perez Cicario (“el ejecutor de la justicia”), whereupon’ the government immediately cracked down on the syndicalist labor union, rounding up all the CNT committee memberis and members of Anarchist groups it could find. Driven underground, the CNT was to disappear from the public arena for the remainder of the decade.

Yet the middle and late 1920s were not a period of total quiescence. Many cenetistas simply drifted into the sindicatos libres (which Primo perpetuated during the dictatorship), where they formed underground antidictatorial syndicalist nuclei. Despite the arrests of May 7, which netted many leading cenetistas, a National Committee of the CNT managed for a time to carry on a clandestine existence in Saragossa, while a Catalan Regional Committee survived in Mataro. Anarchist action groups, turning to more spectacular actions, attempted several heroic, if foolhardy, armed assaults on the dictatorship. These actions, almost foredoomed to failure, were largely symbolic. On November 6, 1924, smalt groups of militants attacked the Atarazanas barracks in Barcelona, apparantly assured that the fortress gates would be opened by supporters within. At the same time, a small armed band of Anarchist exiles in France, led by Durruti, crossed the frontier and invaded Vera de Bidasoa, clashing with the Civil Guard. Both attempts miscarried completely. In Barcelona, two captured Anarchists, Juan Montijo Aranz and Jose Llacer Bertran, were executed by order of a summary court martial. The Vera de Bidasoa episode claimed the lives of three: Juan Santillan and Enrique Gil, who were executed, and another condemned participant, Pablo Martin, who leaped to his death from the prison gallery.

Perhaps the most renowned of the Anarchist conspiracies during the dictatorship was an audacious plot hatched by Durruti, Ascaso, and Grigorio Jover to kidnap the king’during a state visit to Paris in the summer of 1924. Arrested by the French police, the three “Solidarios” made no attempt to deny their plot; yes, they declared emphatically, they planned to hold Alfonso in return for the dissolution of the dictatorship. Durruti and Ascaso, who had been in Latin America before arriving in France, were also charged with holding up the Banca San Martin in Argentina. The Argentine government demanded that they be extradited, while the Spanish government placed its own bid for their extradition, citing the Gijon holdup and additionally singling out Ascaso for his role in the assassination of Cardinal Soldevila. The case became a cause celebre. A wave of protests from French intellectuals and workers finally succeeded in quashing the extradition proceedings. Freed a year later, the Anarchists were expelled from the country, later to be expelled from Germany at the request of the Social Democratic minister of interior of Prussia. Their attempts to find refuge in Russia became untenable when the Soviet government imposed ideological conditions upon them which, as Anarchists, they could not accept. Thereafter, the exiles returned to France under aliases, were rearrested and held in prison for six months, and eventually made their way back to Germany under false identities.

It should not be supposed that Anarchist activities during this period were limited only to desperate acts by a few bold militants. In May 1925, Primo lifted the state of martial law, and social life in Spain began to ease considerably. During the period that followed, Anarchist and syndicalist periodicals began to appear in a number of cities, particularly in the north. The most notable of these, ¡Despertad!, was published in Vigo and edited by the Galician Jose Villaverde. The paper, serving as a major link for cenetistas in the north, enjoyed a considerable reputation for its vigorous writing and high theoretical level. In addition, the CNT published Action Social Obrera in Girona, El Productor in Blanes, Redencion in Alcoy, and Horizontes in Elda. Even La Revista Blanca, which had enjoyed such a distinguished reputation in the previous century, was revived. In Valencia, where Anarchism was known for its artistic interests, Estudios devoted itself, in Jose Peirats’ words, to “themes on physical and human regeneration.” The individualist Anarchists, in collaboration with vegetarians, naturalists, hedonists, and anarcho-mystics, published Iniciales. In a delightful passage, Peirats tells us that these

extreme tendencies flourished in the anarchism of those times—stormy for some and times of hibernation for the majority. Secret meetings in the mountains were disguised as the excursions of ingenuous nudists, devotees of pure air, and sunbathers. All of this forms a picturesque contrast if one bears in mind that a sincere return to nature was perfectly compatible with conspiratorial planning, the chemistry of explosives, pistol practice, the interchange or periodicals and underground leaflets, and campaigns against tobacco and alcohol.

These preoccupations aside, the closing period of Primo’s regime was marked by mounting conflicts within the CNT. By throwing the union back upon itself, the dictatorship compelled moderates and militants to face the differences that had long divided them— differences that had often been obscured in the past by strikes and mass actions. Exile and life in the underground brought these differences increasingly to the fore. Theoretically, virtually every tendency in the CNT professed to accept Anarchist principles of one sort or another. Segui, despite his obvious reformist proclivities, had consistently declared his commitment to libertarian ideals; so, too, did Pestana, the major spokesman for the moderate tendency after Segui’s death. The moderates, however, regarded the realization of these ideals as a problem of the distant future. To Pestana and his supporters, Spain was not ready for an Anarchist revolution. Rarely invoking Marxist arguments, which would have stressed Spain’s economic backwardness, the moderates shrewdly threw basic libertarian principles in the teeth of their militant opponents. Not only did the CNT lack the support of a majority of the Spanish people, they argued, but it lacked the support of the majority of the Spanish working class. Anarchosyndicalists were a minority within a minority. Even within the CNT membership, a large number of workers and peasants shared only a nominal allegiance to libertarian ideals. They were members of the CNT because the union was strong in their localities and work places. If these people, and Spaniards generally, were not educated in Anarchist principles, warned the moderates, the revolution would simply degenerate into an abhorrent dictatorship of ideologues. Later, in a manifesto that was to split the CNT into two syndicalist movements, the moderates declared that the revolution must not rely exclusively on the “audacity of minorities, more or less brave; we want to see a mass movement of the people unfold, of the working class traveling toward definitive liberation.” As Jose Villaverde declared: “A libertarian communist economy can be established today. But in the political and moral sphere the Confederation will have to establish a dictatorship that is in contrast with its fundamental principles because the working class is not in the CNT.”

This argument would have been incontrovertible had it remained a strategy for revolutionary education. But the moderates used it as a springboard for opportunistic politics. As early as 1924, the moderate-dominated National Committee of the CNT had flirted with a Catalan separatist conspiracy by Colonel Francisco Macia, founder of the Liberal Estat Catala. Two years later, in June 1926, it had become involved in an abortive conspiracy known as the “Night of St. John,” a plot which may have been conceived by the monarchy itself in order to rescue its waning reputation by unseating Primo and reestablishing a constitutional government. Once revealed by the dictatorship, the plot found such reactionary generals as Wevler and Aguilera, demagogues like Lerroux, and venal sycophants like Barriobera in the same conspiratorial bed with Anarchists like Amalio Quilez.

The years 1928 and 1929 mark the period of Primo’s decline and removal from office. Although the dictatorship, sharing in the international economic boom of the 1920s, had materially improved living standards and profits, it had antagonized virtually all sectors of Spanish society. Proposed structural reforms, such as the Municipal Statute of March 1924, which promised to give extensive autonomy to the municipalities, were stillborn, leaving the restive towns in the hands of government appointees. The plan of Calvo Sotelo, Primo’s finance minister, to introduce an effective income tax antagonized the financially irresponsible. The dictatorship’s rural policy was confined largely to road-building, irrigation, and electrification projects, leaving the vital issue of land reform untouched; and despite the collaboration of the Socialists with the government, the Spanish working class did not have to be told that its legal organizations were the supine tools of the regime. But Primo made his greatest miscalculation when he alienated the most important pillar of his regime—the army—by challenging the seniority prerogatives of the artillery corps. Even Alfonso became a victim of this error. By failing to back the protesting officers, the king turned the artillery commanders into a corps of Republicans.

Having antagonized leading financiers as well as peasants, officers as well as workers, local town officials, as well as Madrid constitutionalists, Primo proceeded to lose whatever political support he might have gathered from the conservative middle classes and intellectuals. A respectable opposition within the towns and universities began to emerge, openly raising the cry for constitutional legality. Primo’s attempt to create a constitution, based on a sharp separation between elective and corporative powers, merely widened this opposition to include the Monarchists, for the constitution barred the king from appointing and dismissing ministries. In the spring of 1928, widespread student protests presented the dictatorship with its first overt opposition since 1924. Under the relaxation of censorship introduced by the regime, the Liberal Madrid journal El Sol, commenting on the constitution, bluntly “advised” Primo “to abandon his post.” Not to be denied a claim to the “exalted defenders ... of Parliament and of public liberties,” Sanchez Guerra, the seventy-year-old leader of the Conservative Party, crossed the frontier into Spain and offered his person as an umbrella of respectability for a prearranged pronunciatnienio by General Castro Girona, the captain general of Valencia. But the general reneged on the old man and arrested him. The plot ended in a fiasco; only the artillery officers at Ciudad Real revolted.

Despite the failure of the “Valencia Conspiracy,” as this narrow-based abortion by old Conservative politicians was called, the dictatorship was on its last legs. On January 26, Primo, agonized by growing internal opposition and fiscal difficulties, .circulated a query to the captain generals, asking if the army supported him. If it did not, averred the dictator, he would resign immediately. Not only were the replies less than enthusiastic, but it was evident to Primo that the king was determined to remove him from office. On January 28, 1929, two days after his query, Primo de Rivera resigned and departed for the fleshpots of Paris, where he died a few months later. His place was taken by General Damaso Berenguer, a highly respected but ailing officer who could hardly be regarded as a permanent fixture in Spanish politics. Berenguer was entrusted with the impossible task of restoring a constitutional government without jeopardizing the future of the monarchy.

The CNT did not remain aloof from the antidictatorial conspiracies that marked the closing period of Primo’s regime. In the course of Organizing the “Valencia Conspiracy,” Sanchez Guerra had approached a CNT contact committee in Paris, soliciting the union’s cooperation. The moderates were determined not to be found lagging in the antidictatorial movement, despite a decision by a previous plenum forbidding the CNT’s National Committee from negotiating with political parties. On July 28, 1928, the National Committee convoked a clandestine plenum in Barcelona, including delegates fron all the regions except for the volatile Levant, with the purpose o. authorizing negotiations with antidictatorial politicians and military leaders. Having pocketed the plenum’s authority, the National Committee joined in the “Valencia Conspiracy.” If we are to believe Comin Colomer, a police official turned historian, whose rather unreliable historiography draws lavishly on police files, several syndicates supported the conspiracy with strikes. By and large, however, the CNT’s role seems to have been as stillborn as the conspiracy itself.

Actually, the CNT contributed very little to Primo’s downfall. Its attempts to formulate a consistent policy in the struggle against the dictatorship are interesting primarily as evidence of a bitter tug-of-war between militant Anarchist revolutionaries and cautious syndicalist moderates. Cushioning this conflict was a centrist tendency, perhaps best represented by Manuel Buenacasa, which tried guardedly to achieve a compromise between the two wings. By controlling the National Committee, the moderates had only to work through the CNT’s structure to achieve a sense of unity. The union’s apparatus held them together. By contrast, the Anarchists were dispersed in small groups. The National Federation of Anarchist Groups (FNGA), founded in the stormy postwar years, was virtually defunct. On the initiative of Catalan Anarchist groups and the Federation of Anarchist Groups of the Spanish Language, a Marseilles-based organization of exiles, serious attempts were made to revive a national movement. On July 24 and 25, 1927, a clandestine conference of Spanish and Portuguese Anarchists was held at Valencia. To guard the delegates from Primo’s watchful police agents, the dates for the conference were selected to coincide with a fiesta that brought thousands of visitors into the Mediterranean city. Peirats gives us an amusing picture of the delegates disporting themselves at the seashore as vacationers:

A group of well-bronzed bathers, stretching out on the golden beach by the surface of the Latin sea under the benevolent and warm caress of the sun—men, women, young, old, and children, some of them gathered in arms, others occupied with diversions and games, the classic “paella” bubbling and boiling ... —this gathering formed the birth of one of the revolutionary organizations which very soon was to express its romantic dreams, its virility and its heroism: the FAI.

The FAI, or Federacion Anarquista Iberica (Iberian Anarchist Federation), occupies a unique and fascinating place in the history of classical workers’ and peasants’ movements. Organized primarily to assure the CNT’s commitment to Anarchist principles, the FAI acquired ts. reputation as one of the most dreaded and admired organizations of %volutionaries to emerge in Spain. The term “Iberian” had been chosen to express the organization’s peninsular scope; the FAI originally intended to include Portuguese as well as Spanish Anarchists. (In reality, it remained Spanish, acquiring its own distinctive forms and ambiance. The new organization based itself on the traditional nuclear groups so ardently favored by Spanish Anarchists since the days of the First International. The “affinity group” (grupo de afinidad), a term officially adopted by the FAI, accurately denotes the early Spanish Anarchist concept that true revolutionary groups must be kept small in order to foster a sense of deep intimacy between members. An affinity group rarely numbered more than a dozen people. Each member was drawn to others not only by common social principles but also by common personal proclivities, or “affinities.” The group, in effect, was an extended family—with the added feature that the Spanish Anarchists placed an immensely high premium on personal initiative and independence of spirit. Owing to this intimacy, a faista affinity group was not easily penetrated by police agents. The FAI continued to be a, secret organization, highly selective in its choice of members, up to the Civil War, although it easily could have acquired legal status after the founding of the republic.

Like the CNT, the FAI was structured along confederal lines: the affinity groups in a locality were linked together in a Local Federation and the Local Federations in District and Regional Federations. A Local Federation was administered by an ongoing secretariat, usually of three persons, and a committee composed of one mandated delegate from each affinity group. This body comprised a sort of local executive committee. To allow for a full expression of rank-and-file views, the Local Federation was obliged to convene assemblies of all the faistas in its area. The District and Regional Federations, in turn were simply the Local Federation writ large, replicating the structure of the lower body. All the Local Districts and Regional Federations were linked together by a Peninsular Committee whose tasks, at least theoretically, were administrative. The Peninsular Committee was responsible for handling correspondence, for dealing with practical organizational details, and (in the words of Ildefonso Gonzalez, an FAI secretary) for “executing any general agreements of the organization.”

Gonzalez frankly admits that the FAI “exhibited a tendency toward centralism.” That a Peninsular Committee with aggressive members walked a very thin line between a Bolshevik-type Central Committee and a mere administrative body is not hard to believe. And the FAI contained very aggressive, indeed charismatic leaders, such as Garcia Oliver, the Ascaso brothers; and Durruti. The major policy declarations of the FAI were more commonly presented in the name of the Peninsular Committee than of faista plenums. This accustomed readers of FAI documents to regard the Peninsular Committee as an oracular body. Shielded by secrecy, the Peninsular Committee might well have enjoyed a wider latitude in the formulation of policy than would have been consistent with its expressed libertarian principles.

Yet it must also be emphasized that the affinity groups were far more independent than any comparable bodies in the Socialist Party, much less the Communist. We have only to read Ramon Sender’s Seven Red Sundays, a novel based on a detailed knowledge of the Madrid FAI organization, to gain a feeling for -the high degree of initiative that marked the typical faista’s behavior. In later years, all the non-Anarchist organizations of the Spanish left were to declaim against Anarchist “incontrolados” or “uncontrollables” who persistently acted on their own in terrorist acts, defying governmental and even FAI policies. The very atmosphere of the organization spawned such people. We shall also see that the FAI was not an internally repressive organization, even after it began to decay as a libertarian movement. Almost as a matter of second nature, dissidents were permitted a considerable amount of freedom in voicing and publishing material against the leadership and established policies.

Every member of the FAI was expected to join a CNT syndicate. That the FAI tried to bypass the CNT membership, as Comin Colomer asserts, and take over the union indirectly by implanting nuclei of Anarchists in every Local and Regional Committee of the CNT, is not clear from the available facts. It was no secret, to be sure, that the Spanish Anarchists hoped to guide CNT policy. Even centrists such as Buenacasa, who became one of the earliest secretaries of the Peninsular Committee, may have joined the FAI mainly to dislodge the CNT’s moderate leadership. If so, his motives were not exceptional; quite a few centrists, who like Buenacasa abhorred violent tactics, seem to have occupied key positions in the FAI at various times, probably with the same goals in mind. But this much is evident: by far the greater number of faistas were young, highly volatile men and women whose real preoccupation was not with the CNT apparatus but rather with direct, often violent action against the established social order. These “young eagles of the FAI” and their more “technical” affinity groups were responsible for the recurrent insurrections, the “forced appropriations” of banks and jewelry stores and the terrorist actions that marked faista activity in the stormy Republican period before the Civil War.

Owing to the FAI’s passion for secrecy, we know very little about its membership figures. Judging by data published by Diego Abad de Santillan, a leading faista, the figure on the eve of the Civil War may have been close to 39,000. In any case, so carefully did the organization guard its clandestinity that it made no attempt to reveal its existence publicly until 1929, more than two years after it had been founded. In December of that year, the Peninsular Committee issued its first public statement as an organization—a manifesto that sharply denounced the moderate tendency in the CNT.

The events leading up to the FAI’s manifesto reveal the sharp differences that were rending the CNT. The fact that the FAl was created in the summer of 1927 is probably not accidental; it was around this that Pestana, addressing members of the Barcelona textile syndicate, suggested that the dictatorship’s comites paritarios were compatible with the CNT’s principles. Pestana was prudent enough not to call for the entry of CNT delegates into the comites, but his views raised a furor among militant and centrist Anarchists. Yet these views were mild compared with Pestana’s frontal demands two years later. In a series of articles titled “Situemonos,” published in ¡Despertad!, Pestana called for entirely new principles for the CNT and, in a particularly cutting play on words, described the organization as “moderate” (contenido), not as “abstinent” (continente). This word play could be taken as a snide attack on Anarchist puritanism as well as purism. Peiro, replying on behalf of the centrists, acknowledged that while “confederal congresses could modify all the principles of the CNT,” they could not challenge the organization’s “reason for being: antiparliamentarism and direct action.” Peiro’s views had the support of other leading centrists, notably Buenacasa and Eusebio Carbo, both of whom enjoyed immense prestige among all syndicalist tendencies. Evidently, a great deal of counterpressure from left and centrist Anarchists began to build up against the moderates, for in the autumn of 1929 the moderate-controlled National Committee suddenly submitted its resignation in ¡Despertad! and intoned the “organic demise” (Peirats) of the CNT.

It is within this context of growing conflict that we must examine the FAI’s first public statement. The manifesto reads more like an ultimatum than an argument. In a brief, almost ponderously legalistic document, the secretariat of the Peninsular Committee declares that to believe the workers’ movement can be ideologically neutral is an error. Although material gains and improved working conditions are worthwhile goals, the workers’ movement must seek the “absolute cauterization of all the prevalent wounds and the complete disappearance of economic and political privileges.” To this end, the CNT must establish a “connection” with the organism that adheres to these revolutionary tactics and postulates—namely, the FAI. “If the CNT, on the contrary, does not accept the propositions made by the FAI’s secretariat,” the statement concludes, “it very possibly risks a very pernicious deviation from the cause of integral demands and the destruction of the moral and revolutionary values which alone distinguishes it....”

It is plain that Pestana and the moderates had at least one strategic goal in mind—the legalization of the CNT. And they sought this goal even if it meant major concessions to the dictatorship. By offering to resign, the National Committee may well have been trying, in dramatic fashion, to force the issue. In any event, the entire question of legality soon became academic. The replacement of Primo by Berenguer in January 1930 completely altered the de facto status of the CNT and many syndicates began to function openly even before they acquired official legality.

The conflict between the moderates and Anarchist militants, however, did not disappear. On the contrary, it now settled down to basic differences in revolutionary strategy—differences that were to reach truly schismatic proportions in the early years of the republic. In the course of a broad statement on CNT goals, the moderate-controlled National Committee had managed to note its “concern over national problems” and more specifically its willingness “to intervene using its own methods with their ideology and history in the process of constitutional revion....” With this formulation as an anchor, the National Committee proceeded to declare, in effect, that it welcomed a republic as the most congenial framework in which to work for libertarian goals. The statement thus visualized a Spanish revolution as divided into two stages: the first (and more immediate one), a bourgeois democracy; the second (and more visionary one), a libertarian communist society. If one removes the National Committee’s usual obeisances to broad Anarchosyndicalist ideals, its perspective could hardly be distinguished from that of the much-despised UGT. Needless to say, the National Committee’s “scandalous” statement (as Peirats calls it) produced another uproar among Anarchist militants and further polarize’d the’CNT.

Convoluted as these details may seem, they are vitally important to an understanding of the CNT’s later development. The moderates were not merely willing to collaborate with bourgeois groups in order to establish a republic; they were also willing to follow a prudent and accommodating strategy within a republican framework. The Anarchist militants, on the other hand, were advocating a policy of unrelenting opposition to the state, be it dictatorial, monarchical, or republican. Much of the CNT’s history in the years to follow was to turn around conflicts and compromises between these positions.

Even under the Berenguer regime, events were to show that the two policies were not mutually exclusive. Moderates were to take seemingly intransigent stands when it suited their purposes and the FAI to make concessions of its own when they furthered its shortterm ends. It is interesting to note that in the sub rosa negotiations that led to the CNT’s legalization, Pestana, representing the union, assumed an unrelenting Anarchosyndicalist position even to the point of dismissing the comites paritarios as a “monstrosity.” Whether this firmness was the result of newly acquired convictions under changed political conditions or merely a shrewd accommodation to rank-and-file militancy is difficult to judge. Angel Pestana was not a demagogue; indeed, it is only fair to say that he was a man of great integrity and exceptional courage. General Mola, who represented the government in the negotiations, was obviously impressed by the dignity of this intensely moral labor, leader—tall, lean, dressed in rough clothing, with an “inquisitive” demeanor. Although Pestana may have been willing to enter the comitas paritarios three years earlier, when harsh conditions seemed to warrant this approach, Mola notes that he expressed genuine outrage over the fact that the labor delegates to the comites received salaries and were thus separated from their fellow wage-earners.

By the same token, the FAI did not always behave as a pure flame of Anarchist consistency; on the contrary, it was ready to bend its antiparliamentary principles almost to the breaking point when crucial situations arose. Thus, in the municipal elections of 1931, faista delegates joined their moderate opponents in supporting a Republican-Socialist coalition that packed the king off to exile. And although the FAI did not participate in the electoral coalitions of 1936, it “released” Anarchist workers from their no-voting scruples and contributed decisively to bringing the Popular Front to power.

The most serious inconsistencies of the FAI were to become painfully evident later—and in a more crucial context in the development of the Spanish labor movement. For the present, Primo’s departure had opened a period of rebuilding for the scattered forces of Anarchosyndicalism. On April 30, 1930, the CNT was granted a form of “conditional” legality by the governor of Barcelona, followed by legalization in other provinces.[34] Although many syndicates were still illegal elsewhere in the country and thousands of cenetistas filled the jails of the Berenguer regime, Spanish Anarchosyndicalism began to pick up the threads that had been broken by the dictatorship in 1924. In little more than a year, the CNT membership numbered close to a half million. This figure, to be sure, is much lower than the CNT’s peak membership of 700,000 in 1919, but it is quite substantial if one bears in mind that the organization was virtually nonexistent during the seven years of Primo’s rule. In a series of conferences, plenums, and organizing drives, the CNT recouped the greater part of its losses and suceeded rapidly in restoring most of its contacts with other areas of the country. Solidaridad Obrera in Barcelona began to appear as a daily shortly after it was legalized on August 30 and, following the custom of the predictatorial years, sister publications with the same name began to spring up in other cities of Spain.

But the CNT of 1930 was no longer the same organization Primo had suppressed in 1924, nor was the FAI the same as the FNGA. The bloody pistolero period of 1919–23, the acrimonious years of introversion which brought latent differences to the surface, and the harsh experiences of repression by the dictatorship had altered greatly the atmosphere in the CNT and in Anarchist groups. The moderate, almost ecumenical outlook that had prevailed in the old CNT and even in the FNGA, had been invaded by an increasingly intractable spirit. The pistolero conflicts had produced a new kind of Anarchist—young, grim, prone to violence, and impatient with temporizing measures and compromises. These young Anarchists, typified by Durruti, Garcia Oliver, Ascaso, and Sanz, were accustomed to bold escapades. They were ilegales in the full sense of the term. Even the “pure-and-simple” unionists were shaken in their moderate views particularly after 1929, when the world economic crisis began to nourish a new spirit of militancy in the working class. Slowly, the bulk of rank-and-file members in the CNT came to favor the FAI over the moderates, the militants over the temporizers, the high-spirited young Anarchists over the older, more prudent, union-oriented leadership of an earlier generation.

In 1930 and 1931, however, the moderates still controlled the CNT and centrists like Buenacasa apparently continued to hold the young faistas in rein. The National Committee and the editorial staiff of Solidaridad Obrera were in the hands of moderates and centrists. Nor was this control likely to be shaken without changes in the outlook of the Catalan cenetistas. Following the tradition of the old International, the CNT gave the responsibility of selecting the entire National Committee to the region which congresses had assigned as the national center of the union. Until the 1930s, the repeated choice of Catalonia and specifically Barcelona as the CNT’s national office almost guaranteed moderate control over the National Committee and Solidaridad Obrera.

The weight of Catalonian influence reveals still another change that had occurred in the fortunes of Spanish Anarchosyndicalism— the eclipse of Andalusia as a decisive area of the movement. Contrary to the usual accounts of Spanish Anarchism, the CNT was largely composed of workers rather than peasants and its focus was primarily on the culturally advanced north rather than the backward south. The myth that Spanish Anarchism remained little more than an inchoate, village-based movement with peripheral working-class support has been refuted tellingly by Malefakis’s recent study of peasant unrest in Spain. In 1873, when Spanish Anarchism exercised a considerable influence in the countryside, Andalusia (both urban and rural) provided nearly two thirds of the old International’s membership. By 1936, this proportion had declined to about a fifth. As Malefakis observes:

The predominance of Andalusia in the Anarchist federations of’the 1870s and 1880s had disappeared after the turn of the century and was but a distant memory. The two ancient centers of Spanish anarchism Catalonia and Andalusia were no longer in any sense equal. Urban anarchosyndicalism had far outdistanced rural; Catalonia far overshadowed Andalusia. This was especially true because Catalonia was now flanked by a new Anarchosyndicalist stronghold in Saragossa. The ties between these two regions were so much more intimate than those maintained by either with any other part of Spain that one may safely speak of a new geographical bloc within the CNT. The FAI leaders— Durruti, the Ascasos, and Garcia Oliver—were all from Barcelona and Saragossa. The major insurrections of the CNT-FAI originated and found most of their response within these two regions. And it was this bloc, with some assistance from the neighboring Levante, that was to carry on the Civil War for the Anarchosyndicalists after Andalusia had fallen to the Nationalists.

Attempts were made to revive the peasant movement, but they were half-hearted. The old Anarchosyndicalist FNAE (Federation National de Agricultores de Espania) had been swallowed up by the repressive dictatorship; its newspaper, La Voz del Campesino, was revived in 1932 in Jerez de la Frontera, only to disappear later the same year. In 1931, at the CNT Extraordinary Congress of Madrid, a proposal was adopted to call a peasant congress and create a rural federation. The congress never came off. The CNT, to be sure, still had considerable strength in the cities of the south—especially in Cadiz, Malaga, Cordoba, and Seville—and in a number of Andalusian villages. But ties between the cities and villages were extremely weak. “Little effective cooperation,” observes Malefakis, “existed between the Anarchosyndicalist unions of the major Andalusian cities and their rural counterparts.”

The authentic peasant base of the CNT, now lay in Aragon. The conversion of Saragossa during the early 1920s to a brand of Anarchism more “black” and resolute than that of Barcelona provided a springboard for a highly effective libertarian agitation in lower Aragon, particularly among the impoverished laborers and debt-ridden peasantry of the dry steppe region. Aside from the Union de Rabassaires in the vine-growing region, the Catalan countryside too had been infected by Anarchist agitation emanating from Barcelona. The CNT still preserved its strength in the mountain villages of the Levant and the Galician countryside around Coruna. Most of these rural areas were quiescent during the dictatorship. Not until the proclamation of the republic, with its promise of land reform and its new political possibilities, did the Spanish countryside spring to life again as a social force.

With Primo’s departure, Spain began to settle its accounts with the monarchy. Alfonso, tainted by his role in establishing the dictatorship, tried desperately to retain the throne as a quasiconstitutional monarch. But the monarchy—both in the, person of Alfonso and as an institution—had discredited itself completely. Berenguer’s delays in assembling the Cortes and Alfonso’s obvious maneuvers to retain his royal prerogatives eroded the confidence even of conservative politicians. “I am not a Republican,” declared the old conservative wheelhorse Sanchez Guerra, “but I recognize that Spain has a right to be a Republic.” Conspiracies against the dictatorship were now replaced by conspiracies, against the monarchy, and they included not only Republicans and Socialists, but Liberal caciques like Alcala Zamora and army officers such as Queipo de Llano and Ramon Franco, the brother of the future caudillo. The gnawing conflicts over Catalan autonomy, which divided Republican ranks between Catalans and Spaniards, were resolved in August 1930, when both wings signed the famous Pact of San Sebastian. Catalonia was promised far-reaching autonomy in her internal affairs. The Pact was signed by a widely disparate group of politicians including Alcala Zamora, Manuel Azaña (a Republican litterateur whose roots lay in the fashionable Ateneo, a Liberal Madrid literary and political club), and the inevitable Alejandro Lerroux. The San Sebastian crowd, from which Republican Spain was to recruit several of its presidents and prime ministers, was pledged to “revolutionary action” against the monarchy—an excursion into militant rhetoric that the Pact’s signers were to modify considerably with mea culpas and appeals to nonviolence.

Two uncertainties confronted the National Revolutionary Committee which had emerged from the Pact: the role of the army and the workers in the overthrow of the king.-The army, to be sure, would not shoot down Republicans, but would it join actively in a Republican rising? The only reliable mass following the Republicans could rely on were the workers but the Committee balked at giving them arms. Hateful as the monarchy was to the Ateneo Liberals, the specter of an armed working class terrified them. To keep the CNT from participating in the San Sebastian cabal without offending its sensibilities, the Republicans tactfully invited neither of the two labor organizations to the signing of the Pact.

How, then, could the CNT’s aid be deployed against the monarchy without risking an authentic social revolution? Taking the Anarchosyndicalist bit in its teeth, the National Revolutionary Committee dispatched Miguel Maura and Angel Galarza to Barcelona to enlist the CNT’s participation in a “peaceful” general strike against the monarchy. The strike, to be ignited by the UGT’s railway workers, was to climax in a general rising of the military. There is no evidence that the CNT had any second thoughts about this plan. According to the moderate cenetista, Juan Peiro, the CNT at a national plenum of its regional delegates “agreed to establish an exchange of information among the political elements with the object of forming a revolutionary committee.” Stated more bluntly, the CNT gave its assent to the plan. The plenum’s delegates, to assure their independence, decided to prepare a manifesto that affirmed the CNT’s commitment to apolitical principles and its adherence to libertarian forms of organization.

The general strike turned out to be a shabby failure, snarled by changes in dates, poor communications, and a gross miscalculation of the army’s attitude. The uprising was’ scheduled for December 15. According to the Republican version, it was unexpectedly pushed back to December 12 by a premature revolt of the Jaca garrison in Aragon. The rebellious troops were quickly subdued and their two commanders, Captains Fermin Galan and Garcia Hernandez, executed by firing squads. Alcala Zamora, Miguel Maura, and their Socialist collaborators, Largo Caballero and Fernando de los Rios, were arrested without difficulty in Madrid. The CNT issued a call for a general strike and attempted armed attacks on strategic installations, but all its efforts came to grief.

Peirats, taking issue with the Republican version of the Jaca rebellion, gives us an entirely different account. Apparently this rebellion had indeed been planned for the 12^th, but the National Revolutionary Committee had decided upon a delay. Casares Quiroga was sent off as an emissary to forestall the rising, but “on arriving in Jaca at night,” notes Peirats, “he had preferred to sleep instead of complying instantly with his urgent mission.” If Peirats’s version is true, Galan and Garcia Hernandez were the needless victims of Repubilcan slovenliness. Since everyone in Spain knew that the declaration of a republic was merely a matter of time (everyone, that is, except the monarchy), the arrested Madrid conspirators were treated leniently— indeed with deference, as the future leaders of the state. They spent only a few months in prison and received provisional liberties. “One could hope for no more from that so-called Revolutionary Committee,” concludes Peirats acidly, “which had its social seat in the Madrid Ateneo and which later, when it was put in prison, was equipped with telephone service and silk pajamas.”

The CNT can hardly be reproached for its role in these events. Left to its own devices, the union had functioned more creditably than all of its Republican and Socialist “allies.” CNT strikes, both before and after the “rising” of December 12, were almost uniformly impressive and the union’s efforts to reknit its forces generally met with success. The first plenum of the Catalan Regional Federation, held on May 17, 1930, initiated a drive to publish Solidaridad Obrera as a daily. This was followed by a public plenary meeting on July 6. Shortly after the second Catalan regional plenum, on October 5 and 6, the National Committee suggested that a National Conference of Syndicates be convened two weeks later, but the conference was suspended owing to the heated political situation in Spain. Taking advantage of a general strike in Madrid that had broken out in reaction to police brutality, the CNT decided to present a show of force of its own. The union’s purpose, explains Peirats,

was to show that a general strike was possible in Barcelona even though the transport syndicate had been closed down by the governor. The governor, Despujols, was obliged to admit the obvious—that his refusal to accede to the legalization of this syndicate had served for nothing. The work stoppage was total.... The end of the strike was fixed for November 20 (it had started on the 17^th) but the workers had continued it to the 24^th. It had spread to various important townships in the region and the jails were so full that a number of ships anchored in the harbor had to be used to supplement them.

The Republican fiasco of December 12, 1930, had not resolved the problems of the CNT’s relationship to bourgeois political movements. In theory, at least, the CNT adhered to antistatist principles. Rejecting political methods for social change, it advocated direct action by the oppressed against any system of political authority. The more intransigent Anarchists in the union carried these principles one step further and argued that every state was bad, be it monarchial, dictatorial, or republican, and could not be supported. But were these different state forms equally bad? Were no distinctions to be drawn between them in terms of Anarchist tactics? The CNT could hardly ignore the fact that significant differences existed between a dictatorship and a republic, indeed, between a monarchy and a republic. Primo’s regime had virtually smashed any form of overt syndicalist activity in Spain, whereas a republic would clearly open new opportunities for syndicalist growth. Indeed, however much the Spanish Anarchists had denied the importance of distinctions in state forms, in practice they had reacted to these differences from the very inception of their movement. They had joined with radical Federalists in the early 1870s to create a cantonal republic. During the general strike of 1917, the CNT had proclaimed a minimum program which declared for a republic, the separation of church and state, divorce laws, and the right of unions to veto legislation passed by the Cortes. In March 1930, Peiro and three of his centrist comrades had added their names to a Republican manifesto that raised even milder demands than the CNT’s earlier minimum program. Writing in Accion Social Obrera, Peiro, despite much breast-beating about the inviolability of his conscience, frankly admitted that his gesture stood in “contradiction” with his libertarian principles.

The FAI, although it had been led by its centrist members into shadowy violations of Anarchist principles, decried these contradictions vigorously. Faistas like Buenacasa had muted the voices of the young militants but had not silenced them. The failure of the Republican “rising” in December merely reinforced the intransigent position of the “young eagles of the FAI” toward the Republicans; indeed, even the centrists had begun to waver, some turning to a hard, noncollaborative stand and others to a moderate one.

How would the CNT deal with the republic once it emerged? This annoying question came increasingly to the fore as the monarchy began to totter. In February 1931, Berenguer, faced by massive public hostility, resigned his office. The king, forced to make meaningful concessions, had finally decided to remove the government-appointed municipalities that existed under Primo and to allow unfettered municipal elections. A nonpolitical government, headed by Admifal Aznar, took over Berenguer’s vacant place. Even the king recognized that the destiny of the monarchy now depended upon the outcome of the municipal elections. On April 12, 1931, Spain went to the polls. By evening, the earliest returns left no doubt that the Republican-Socialist coalition had won a stunning victory. Two days later, Alfonso departed hastily for Marseilles while the avenues of Spain’s major cities were swollen with jubilant crowds waving Republican flags.

The Azaña Coalition

The Second Republic began its career in an atmosphere of public elation. Spain, swept up as by a national festival, flocked into the streets, hailed the new regime, and decorated itself in the Republican ^tricolor. Self-discipline became the maxim of the day. To protect the queen mother and her children from unruly crowds, Socialists from the Casa del Pueblo of Madrid provided them with a guard of young workers in red armbands. A hastily improvised citizens’ police force guarded the doors of banks to prevent looting. Every effort was made to avoid dishonoring the new regime with acts of vandalism and destruction. In the words of Ramos Oliveira, “Both Spaniards and foreigners commented on the magnanimity and discipline of the people who, on recognizing liberty and power, made no use of their conquest to destroy or humiliate their erstwhile oppressors.”

Yet within a year of this generous outburst of popular goodwill, the republic was to be torn by bitter political conflicts and bloody strike waves—and two years later it was to fall into the hands of rabid political’ opponents. The steady decline in the republic’s prestige was virtually inevitable. The Second Republic, precisely because of its goodwill, had brought to power the most disparate group of politicians and labor leaders ever to adorn a Spanish cabinet. The new prime minister, Alcala Zamora, presided over a government that included Miguel Maura, an ex-Monarchist and ardent Catholic; Casares Quiroga, a wealthy Galician Liberal who, with Manuel Azaña, later formed the Left Republicans; Martinez Barrio and Alejandro Lerroux, both luminaries of the venal Radical Party; and three Socialists: Largo Caballero, Fernando de los Rios, and Indalecio Prieto, the latter a spokesman for the party’s right wing. For the most part, the new cabinet consisted of the men of San Sebastian. And once Alfonso had been removed, nearly all of them—singly or in pairs—were poised to desert each other with alacrity.

Alcala Zamora and Maura had entered the cabinet to make sure that the republic did not become too republican, i.e., that it left the landed estates, the church, and the army largely intact. Azaña and Casares Quiroga, as spokesman for the lower middle classes and intellectuals, recognized the need for reforms; but how much reform was possible in the face of an anti-republican oligarchy, a covertly reactionary army, an overtly reactionary church, and a revolutionary working class remained an imponderable. Martinez Barrio and Lerroux made a career of vacillation between the anti-republican oligarchy and the Ateneo Liberals. Later, they parted ways when Martinez broke from Lerroux and drifted toward the Liberals. The Socialists, committed to a bourgeois republic, provided Azaña and Casares Quiroga with a “responsible” left wing. Deployed by the Republicans to keep the proletariat in rein, they remained the beggars of Liberalism, pressing for reforms that invariably ended in shabby compromises.

The primary tasks of the new government were sternly Jacobin: to expropriate the great landed magnates, adopt effective measures against the deepening economic crisis, curb the army’s role in political life, and weaken the church’s hold on Spanish society. Had such a program been resolutely carried out in the opening months of the republic, when popular enthusiasm was still running high, the Liberals might have raised Spain to the level of a European bourgeois nation. But the government delayed, fearful of alienating the very classes it was obliged to oppose, while a Constituent Cortes occupied itself with writing a constitution. Although humane and brightly liberal in spirit, the constitution became a mechanism for placing legal formalities before social activism. In the end, nobody took this document very seriously. The constitution, however, served to reveal the patchwork nature of the new cabinet. When the Cortes adopted Article 26—a constitutional provision aimed at the enormous power of the Spanish church—Alcala Zamora and Maura resigned, the former to be reincorporated into the republic as its president. Azaña, whose well-reasoned defense of Article 26 placed him in the limelight, became the prime minister and the spokesman for Republican virtue. These opening months, however, were not entirely wasted. Largely on the initiative of Largo Caballero, the new minister of labor, the government rapidly passed a series of laws that protected small tenants from arbitrary expulsion from their land and extended the eight-hour working day to the agrarian proletariat. Priority was granted to rural workers’ societies in subleasing large tracts of land. To prevent migrant workers from claiming the jobs of locals, the Cortes, in a Socialist-sponsored Law of Municipal Boundaries, established rural frontiers around some 9,000 municipalities. No outsider could be hired by a landowner within these municipalities until the local labor force had found employment. Another law denied landowners the right to withdraw from cultivation land that had hitherto been farmed according to the “uses and customs” of the region; otherwise, the uncultivated land could be taken over for cultivation by local workers’ organizations.

None of these measures was particularly radical. Although Malefakis describes the laws as “a revolution without precedent in Spanish rural life,” the reasons he adduces for this conclusion are essentially juridical. The laws shifted “the balance of legal rights” from the landowners to the rural masses. But they provided no solution to the endemic unemployment that paralyzed the Spanish countryside and they left the key problem of land ownership unsolved. The republic’s famous Agrarian Statute of September 1932, ostensibly designed to initiate a sweeping land redistribution program, hardly rates serious attention. Lacking adequate funds, hedged by legal stipulations, and burdened by administrative procrastination, the statute hobbled along without changing the status of the rural poor and lawless. By late 1934, two years after the statute’s passage, little more than 12,000 families had received land. The countryside, its hopes deflated by bitter disappointment, became more surly and finally more rebellious than it had been in the stormy years after the war.

Niggardly in its treatment of rural reform, the government swelled with generosity in its dealings with the army. In 1931 the Spanish army could claim the unique distinction of containing more majors and captains than sergeants; its 16 skeletal divisions, which normally required 80 general officers, were serviced by nearly 800. The republic’s law on military reform was modest. The measure reduced the 16 existing divisions to 8, limited compulsory military service to one year, and abolished the rank of captain general, a position that had given the army jurisdiction over the civil government in periods of social unrest. To mollify the officer corps, the government offered full pay to officers who elected to retire, based on the highest rank they would have achieved in the normal course of military service. The army reacted to this decree “with mixed emotions,” observes Gabriel Jackson. “Almost everyone acknowledged that the Army was top heavy with brass, but many a proud career officer felt that Azaña simply wished to destroy the officer corps by buying it off.” As if to feed this suspicion, the government closed down the general military academy at Saragossa, an act which many officers viewed as a “blow to the esprit de corps of the Army, since this was the only institution in which officers of different branches of service trained together.”

In the long run, the government’s reforms left the country profoundly dissatisfied. The republic had awakened suspicion among the conservative classes without diminishing their power; it had also aroused hope among the oppressed without satisfying their needs. The republic, in fact, had hardly been in power more than a month before it suffered its first serious blow. Early in May 1931, Cardinal Segura, the primate of Spain, issued a pastoral letter sharply denouncing the “anarchy” and “grave commotion” that the new regime had introduced. Provocatively, the letter thanked the king for having preserved the piety and cherished traditions of Spain. As luck would have it, three days later scuffles broke out between Monarchists and anti-Monarchists in Madrid; a crowd, angered by anti-Monarchist rumors, gathered before the Ministry of Interior and in the morning hours six convents in the capital were set aflame. The convent burnings spread from Madrid to Malaga, Seville, Alicante, and other cities. The cabinet, fearful of staining the new regime with “Republican blood,” delayed taking action for two days before calling out the army. Although the burnings were rapidly quelled, the damage had already been done; reaction found its issue in the status of the church, and the republic had tarnished its virtue with violence.

The middle classes were duly shocked by these events. Thereafter, right-wing hotheads were to make repeated assaults on the regime, riding on a growing wave of popular disillusionment. By 1932, monarchist and reactionary conspiracies against the republic had graduated to the level of a military coup. On August 10, General Sanjurjo, the erstwhile commander of the Civil Guard, declared against the “illegitimate Cortes” in a poorly planned, indecisive rising in Seville. Sanjurjo was easily defeated and the Azaña regime emerged from the event with considerable prestige. But its victory was shortlived. This government of middle-class Liberals and Socialists had little more than a year of life before it was brought down—and ironically, its fall came not from an assault by the right but rather by the left.

Perhaps the most telling blow came from the Anarchists. The CNT had actually welcomed the republic. In April 1931 many syndicalist workers joined with Socialist workers in voting for the Republican bloc. “The vote of the working class was divided,” notes Madariaga.

The workers affiliated to the UGT (Socialists) voted for their men; but the Anarcho-Syndicalists, whose numbers were about as numerous, voted for the middle-class liberals. There were two reasons for this: the first was the unbridgeable enmity which separates socialists and syndicalists, due to their rival bid for the leadership of the working classes; the second was that as the Anarcho-Syndicalists had always preached contempt for the suffrage, they had no political machinery of their own; so that, when it came to voting, which they did this time to help oust the Monarchy, they preferred to vote for the middle-class Republicans whose liberal views were more in harmony with the anti-Marxist ideas of the Spanish Syndicalists than with the orthodox and dogmatic tenets of the Socialists.[35]

The day after the republic was proclaimed, Solidaridad Obrera ventured a view that was hardly a clarion call to battle against the new state: “We have no enthusiasm for a bourgeois republic but we shall not give our consent to a new Dictatorship....” The newspaper went on to remind its readers that many CNT members still languished in jail and demanded their immediate release. To give muscle to this demand, the Catalan Regional Confederation called a one-day general strike, whereupon the Generalitat (the Catalan provincial government) shrewdly declared the day a national holiday.

Having made these token gestures, the union settled down to a period of watchful waiting. Apart from sporadic violence in which CNT militants settled long-standing accounts with chiefs of the hated libres, Barcelona was comparatively peaceful.[36] The city was still in a festive mood. Catalonia, ignoring the old and discredited Lliga, had calf its vote overwhelmingly for the Esquerra (Catalan Left), a new middle-class party headed by the aging Colonel Maria and a clever young lawyer, Luis Companys. Companys, it will be recalled, had defended cenetistas in the political trials of the 1920s; he knew the union’s moderate leaders personally and was regarded by some of them as a “friend.” Pledged to Catalan autonomy, the Esquerra was linked closely, by both personal ties and common outlook, to the Azaña Republicans. Buoyed by the certainty that autonomy was now within its reach, the public was in no mood to challenge the new republic.

The CNT was wary of the new regime in Madrid. Indeed, it is highly doubtful that any prolonged truce could have existed between the respectable Liberals who headed the republican government and the Anarchist ilegales who were coming to the fore in the CNT. As it turned out, the Azaña coalition did very little to allay the CNT’s suspicions; the Anarchists, stoking the disappointment of the working class into anger, raised demands for a complete break with the republic. Events were soon to unfold that justified the mutual suspicions and hatreds of both sides, escalating government repression and Anarchist assaults into a condition of virtual civil war.

The Socialist Party, it must be added here, played a critical role in exacerbating this conflict. That the UGT and CNT were bitter rivals has already been emphasized by Madariaga and other writers; for decades the two labor organizations had contested each other for every jurisdiction where they overlapped. Rarely did they cooperate, and the few pacts they signed for common action usually degenerated into a welter of mutual recriminations. With the establishment of the republic, Socialist attitudes toward the CNT became unconscionably venomous. “There is a great deal of confusion in the minds of many comrades,” warned a Socialist leader in 1932. “They consider Anarchist Syndicalism as an ideal which runs parallel with our own, when it is its absolute antithesis, and that the Anarchists and Syndicalists are comrades when they are our greatest enemies.”

This statement should not be dismissed as mere rhetoric. It bluntly expresses what many Socialist leaders practiced daily in their relations with the rival union. UGT bureaucrats often provided scabs to break up CNT strikes (and replace the striking syndicates by their own unions)—only to accuse the Anarchosyndicalists of pistolerismo when they defended themselves.[37] Ruthless in the exercise of his powers, Largo Caballero used the immense apparatus of the Ministry of Labor to undermine CNT influence wherever he could. It would be difficult, in fact, to clearly understand the labor legislation of the early republic without bearing in mind this aim of the Socialists. As if to confirm the harshest anti-republican verdict of the Anarchists, the new government passed a law to establish a system of “mixed juries” for dealing with labor disputes. The law made it illegal to strike without first bringing grievances before a “jury” composed equally of labor and employer representatives, with a government representative to break voting deadlocks. Although the jury’s decision was not mandatory, there can be little doubt that it strongly influenced the outcome of many labor disputes by its moral authority. It need hardly be emphasized that the mixed jury system made it possible for Largo Caballero to give UGT representatives easy majorities by appointing Socialists as government representatives. Other legislation specified the conditions labor-management contracts had to fulfill in order to be valid and established a mandatory eight-day “cooling-off” period before workers could go on strike.

To the CNT this corpus of labor legislation was nothing less than a dagger aimed at its most treasured Anarchosyndicalist principles. As Brenan observes,

Apart from the fact that these laws ran contrary to the Anarcho-Syndicalist principles of negotiating directly with the employers and interfered with the practice of lightning strikes, it was clear that they represented an immense increase in the power of the State in industrial matters. A whole army of Government officials, mostly Socialists, made their appearance to enforce the new laws and saw to it that, whenever possible, they should be used to extend the influence of the UGT at the expense of the CNT. This had of course been the intention of those who drew them up. In fact the UGT was rapidly becoming an organ of the state itself and using its new powers to reduce its rival. The Anarcho-Syndicalists could have no illusions as to what would happen to them if a purely Socialist government should come into power.

That the UGT reaped enormous advantages from Socialist collaboration with the government (past as well as present) can be demonstrated with statistical precision. The Socialist labor federation, thanks to its “cooperative” attitude toward the dictatorship, had retained its apparatus intact throughout the 1920s, even increasing its membership slightly. In December 1929, shortly before Primo’s fall, it could claim 1,511 local sections with about 230,000 members. With the establishment of the republic, the UGT enjoyed a phenomenal growth. By December 1931, eight months after the republic was proclaimed, the union could boast of 4,041 local sections and nearly 960,000 members, a tripling of membership in only two years. In July 1932, these figures had soared to almost 5,107 and 1,050,000 respectively.

Most of this expansion occurred in the countryside. In the hectic period directly following the war, the UGT, shaken by the Russian Revolution and Anarchist insurrections in Andalusia, began to discard some of its Marxian shibboleths and direct/its energies toward winning the rural poor. Led by Luis Martinez Gil, a follower of Julian Besteiro, Socialists tried to use Primo’s comites paritarios to extend the UGT’s rather limited roots in southern Spain. In April 1930, the UGT established a separate rural federation, the FNTT or Federation National de Trabajadores de la Tierra (National Federation of Land Workers). It began with a membership of only 27,000, but by June 1933 this figure had soared to 451,000, accounting for 40 percent of the UGT’s total membership.

The CNT watched this increase with alarm. To the Anarchosyndicalists, the growth of Socialist-controlled unions meant nothing less than the bureaucratic corruption of the Spanish masses. They earnestly believed that a UGT worker or peasant was virtually lost to the revolution. What was even more appalling, the UGT, aided by the Ministry of Labor and the mixed juries, began to make serious inroads into traditionally Anarchist areas. Not only were Estremadura and La Mancha Socialist strongholds, but sizable FNTT unions now existed in Malaga, Seville, and Valencia.

Ironically, both labor organizations failed to anticipate the radicalizing impact this massive influx of rural poor would have on Spanish Socialism. The countryside was in the midst of revolutionary ferment. The new Republican agrarian laws had opened the sluice gates of rural discontent without satisfying the peasant’s hunger for land. Thousands of tenants flocked to the courts and to their unions to demand the settlement of grievances under the new laws; strikes and demonstrations swept the countryside, locking the new FNTT in bitter struggles with the civil authorities. The pressure of the impetuous Spanish peasantry and rural proletariat on the UGT bureaucracy began to produce major fissures in the once-solid edifice of Socialist reformism. Although the FNTT’s militancy fell far short of the CNT’s, it is significant that Martinez Gil and Besteiro were strongly opposed to the entry of Socialists into the Republican government. The Socialist left wing, so hopelessly isolated after the Russian Revolution, began to increase its influence in party ranks. Within a few years, it would become the most important tendency in the Socialist Party.

Although the UGT remained the CNT’s main rival, the small Spanish Communist Party began to take up its own cudgels and enter the battle between the two unions. Until the early Republican period, the Communist Party was little more than an interloper in the Spanish labor movement. From a sizable organization at its founding, the party in 1931 had dwindled to little more than a thousand rftembers. Primo had all but ignored its existence. The dictatorship did not even bother to suppress the party’s newspaper, Mundo Obrero. The split between the Communist syndicalists like Nin and Maurin and the traditional Leninists had left the party in the hands of docile mediocrities whose principal qualification for leadership seems to have been their subservience to the Stalinist Comintern. During this period, virtually all Catalan Communists, following the tendency represented by Maurin, had formed the BOC, the Bloc Obrer i Camperol (Worker-Peasant Bloc), a revolutionary organization which stressed the need for cooperation between working-class and left middle-class groups. Others, mainly intellectuals, collected around Nin and established the Izquierda Cominunista or Left Communists, an avowedly Trotskyist organization, also rooted primarily in Catalonia. Together, the BOC and Izquierda Cominunista virtually supplanted the Communist Party in Catalonia and for many years may have outnumbered it in Spain as a whole. In 1936, the two organizations merged to form the POUM—the Partido Obrero de Unification Marxista (Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification)—a sizable organization which became the principal target of Stalinist abuse and repression during the Civil War years.

Generally, the Communist Party exercised very little influence on the Spanish working class. Apart from some nuclei in Asturias and Madrid, the party could boast of only one major achievement: in 1927 it had managed to win control over a considerable number of underground CNT syndicates’in Seville—principally in the dock area— which it began to use as a base for duels with rival Anarchosyndicalist and Socialist unions. During the early 1930s, the Andalusian capital became the arena for a three-way conflict between the CNT, the UGT, and the Stalinist-manipulated “Committee of Reconstruction,”[38] so named because of a conference on Syndicalist Reconstruction which the party had convened in the spring of 1930. According to Gabriel Jackson, who made a recent on-site study of the conflict:

Most of the urban workers belonged to CNT unions. The communists were strongest among the port workers. The UGT Federation of Land Workers had been growing in the villages, and the UGT was challenging the communists for control of the stevedores. Each of these groups, plus the employer organization, the Economic Federation of Andalusia, hired pistoleros on occasion. There were perhaps a dozen clashes leading to death or serious injury during the course of the year 1933.... The pistoleros were hired at a rate of ten pesetas per day, at a time when the average daily wage in unionized factories was about twelve. Each organization reduced the individual risk to its strong-arm men by maintaining hideouts, supplying false papers, and forming prisoner welfare committees to aid those unfortunate enough to see the inside of a jail. The occasional violence was localized in the port area, and if cases came to court, they usually led to acquittal, since none of the witnesses could remember anything.

Such struggles were to be waged with increasing frequency as Spain began to slip into civil war. The Anarchists were not the only source of social violence; employers, Socialists, and Communists hired pistoleros against each other when the need arose—only to unite in accusing the Anarchists of their own crimes. Of course with the FAI at its disposal, the CNT had very little need for professional gunmen. That faistas were prepared to use weapons more readily than the Socialists and Communists at this time is quite true; but they were not cynical paid killers who threatened to corrupt the organizations for which they worked. Reactionary newspapers, like the monarchist ABC, picked up the most trifling altercations in Seville and magnified them enormously in order to terrify the middle-classes. “If a CNT worker punched a communist in a waterfront bar,” notes Jackson, “the Seville edition Of ABC reported an outbreak of lawlessness. If one of the syndicates called a general strike, and a few prudent shopkeepers pulled down their shutters in case anyone might throw a rock, ABC had the city paralyzed. Actually, life was normal outside the port area, and the harbor districts of all the world’s seaports were the scenes of union rivalry and sporadic violence in the 1930s.”

But the period of greatest violence still lay ahead; in 1931 the CNT was largely occupied with internal organizational problems and with defining its strategy toward the republic. An Extraordinary National Congress was planned for mid-June in which these problems were to be thrashed out. This was to be the first national congress of the CNT since 1919. As it turned out, it was to be the last one the Confederation would hold until the eve of the Civil War.[39] When the 418 delegates to the congress convened at the Madrid Conservatory on June 11, the CNT could claim a membership of over a half million, organized into 511 syndicates. If this seems like an inflated figure, as some writers have suggested, it should be added that many syndicates, particularly in the south, were too poor to send delegates. According to the congress’s statistics, the key Catalan Regional Confederation had no more than 240,000 affiliates, most of whom worked in Barcelona, a membership decline in Catalonia of nearly 40 percent since 1919.

The agenda for the congress had been prepared by the National Committee and approved by a plenum of regional delegates. Thus, it was possible for a number of the syndicates to debate the agenda in advance and adopt positions on the issues to be discussed. All this was normative CNT procedure, although in the past, owing to repression and the need for haste, the Confederation had not always adhered to it. At the congress, discussion centered around four issues: the National Committee’s policies during the dictatorship, the all-important question of the present situation in Spain, the need for changes in the CNT’s organizational structure, and, permeating all the issues discussed, the conflicts between the FAI and the moderates. This congress was a crucial one for the CNT, for it paved the way for the defeat of the moderates by the more radical tendencies inside the Confederation. Indeed, the growth of the FAI’s influence on the syndicates was to affect the future not only of the CNT but also of the Second Republic.

The 14-man National Committee, composed entirely of Catalans, fell under attack from the outset of the congress and its members responded with vigor. The give-and-take between individual members of the National Committee and the delegates was a temporary departure from the practice followed by previous CNT congresses. Ordinarily, the National Committee was expected to stand apart from debates between delegates in order to give the latter the widest latitude in discussion. The National Committee’s views were usually voiced in its reports. To cenetistas, every labor leader (even an unpaid one who professed to hold Anarchist views) was a potential bureaucrat who required continual watching. As an argument for removing Pestana from the editorship of Solidaridad Obrera, Buenacasa, for example, noted that the moderate spokesman had not engaged in his profession as a watchmaker for more than five years—a clear sign that he had become too entrenched in the CNT apparatus. It might also be recalled that Pestana, in his talk with Mola, voiced his outrage that the labor delegates to the comites paritarios were paid officials.

The rules of the congress caused great consternation among delegates. Radicals complained that the rules were visibly biased against the FAI; the more moderate delegates, in turn, were outraged that official representatives of the FAI (an “outside organization”) had been admitted to the congress at all. Finally, when a FAI spokesman rose to express his organization’s view on an issue, mayhem broke loose. The FAI could have expressed its views through sympathetic delegates (Garcia Oliver, for example, was an authorized delegate from Reus), but its right to participate in the congress in an official capacity was a matter of prestige. Although most of the delegates would not have denied the FAI a voice in the congress, its spokesman withdrew his request to speak, leaving the onus of suppression on the National Committee and the moderates.

This sparring formed the backdrop to serious discussions on the past and future policies of the Confederation. Perhaps the most breathtaking session occurred when Juan Peiro rose to give an account of the National Committee’s links with the antidictatorial conspiracies of the late 1920s. Very few of the details had been known before, and many delegates, hearing of past negotiations with Liberals who were now among their most bitter enemies, were obviously shocked. Peiro’s report, moreover, was not a mea culpa. He had supported the negotiations then and he supported Pestana’s attempts to accommodate the CNT to the republic now. A number of speakers rose to denounce the National Committee and the delegates passed a resolution that rejected all responsibility for its past actions.

The congress decided that the next region to select the National Committee should be Madrid, thereby breaking Catalonia’s longtime grip on the national organization. The wind, clearly, was blowing against the moderates.

The centrist tendency in the congress, which probably included most of the delegates, was moving toward the left. But this should not be taken to mean that the FAI had gained control of the congress. True, the FAI was making inroads into the Catalan Regional Confederation, to which it owed its invitation to attend the congress. In Barcelona the FAI had planted firm roots in the construction syndicate and probably in the barbers’ syndicate as well. And when the moderates presented a minimum program for the CNT not unlike the reformist demands earlier congress had adopted, the Badalona chemical syndicate and the Barcelona light and power, chemical, and automobile syndicates joined the construction and barbers’ delegates in protest. But the minimum program was accepted by the congress nonetheless. Moreover, despite vigorous FAI opposition, the congress adopted the moderates’ reorganization plan. Essentially, the plan restored the national industrial craft federations which had existed in the old International. The committee report which proposed the plan agreed that the greater concentration of capital required a concomitant structural concentration of the CNT in the form of national federations. While the report, prepared primarily by Juan Peiro, did not urge any diminution in the role and authority of the local geographic federations, it distinctly superimposed a quasi-centralistic industrial structure on the CNT. Ensuing events were to largely nullify the decision to establish the national industrial craft federations—indeed, they were not fully established until the civil war was well underway—but the heated debate which followed the presentation of the plan should not be underestimated.

The significance of this reorganization plan, and of the debate which followed its presentation, can hardly be underestimated. The plan was classical syndicalist doctrine and the FAI, in objecting to it, Unknowingly recapitulated the historic battle that had divided Anarchists from syndicalists at the turn of the century. Garcia Oliver, speaking for the FAI, warned that the plan would result in the centralization of the CNT and denounced it as a corrupting “German invention” that reeked of beer. (The double meaning of Garcia Oliver’s metaphor should be noted. The FAI leader was alluding not only to the “Marxist” thrust of the proposal but also to the support it had received by German syndicalists in the IWMA.) Another delegate rose to warn the congress that the plan would lead to a salaried CNT officialdom. A generation earlier, the Italian Anarchist Errico Malatesta had voiced similar objections in more sophisticated and elegant terms. The objections had lost none of their validity over the passing years.

Although the plan was not really applied until the Civil War it almost certainly reinforced the tendency toward centralization and bureaucratization that had existed in the CNT by identifying comunismo libertario with a potentially centralized economy. Depending upon how decisions flowed between the center and base of the economy, a fragile barrier separated the economic structure advocated in the plan from the nationalized, bureaucratic economic order advocated by the Socialists. Without complete control of the decisionmaking process by assemblies of the factory workers, the two “visions” would be virtually indistinguishable. Tragically, the Confederation did not occupy itself with this crucial problem. On the contrary, the moderates’ argument that the CNT had to adapt itself to the centralist economy created by modern capitalism seemed highly plausible. It was to be echoed five years alter by Diego de Santillan, a very influential faista theoretician whose writings in economic reconstruction provided the CNT with a rationale for accepting a centralized, highly bureaucratic economy during the Civil War.

Why, after voting for the moderates’ reorganization plan and minimum program, did the congress select Madrid as the next center of the CNT? This patent defeat for the moderates would be difficult to explain merely in terms of factional voting patterns. Revolutionary fervor was welling up in the CNT ranks. The rapid collapse of the dictatorship and monarchy, the deepening economic crisis, and the restlessness of the Spanish people after a longer period of torpor combined to create the belief among the Anarchosyndicalists that a libertarian revolution was drawing near. Apparently, many delegates to the congress saw no contradiction between preparing for a revolution and voting for a minimum program that proclaimed the need for democratic rights, secular schools, and the right to strike. The reorganization plan of the moderates must have seemed all the more valuable as a concrete, practical, and eminently constructive alternative to capitalism which Anarchosyndicalists could advance in the event of a revolution.

The FAI spoke to this vision without supporting the moderates’ plans and programs. It favored immediate revolution. The moderates, while offering a concrete alternative to capitalism, denied that Spain was faced with revolution as an imminent prospect. Villaverde, a centrist turned moderate, pointedly warned the delegates: “The Confederation is in no condition to revolt in the historic moment in which we are living.” Like all the moderates he reminded the congress that Anarchosyndicalism had influence only over a small minority of the working class. The delegates, however, seem to have used the moderates’ proposals to give reality to the FAI’s revolutionary perspective. Although the FAI’s specific proposals were defeated by the congress, its revolutionary spirit almost certainly infected the majority of the delegates.

The government did not have to wait long to feel the impact of this growing revolutionary elan. A few weeks after the delegates dispersed, the CNT threw down the gantlet. On July 4, thousands of CNT telephone workers walked off their jobs, confronting the government with what Peirats calls “un ‘test’” of the republic’s intentions. The strike achieved its greatest successes in Barcelona and Seville, where telephone service was cut off completely, but it also affected Madrid, Valencia, and other key communications center in the country. Although the leaders of the telephone syndicate tried to conduct the strike peacefully, serious fighting broke out when armed workers, probably spearheaded by faistas, tried to attack the telephone buildings. The strike quickly “degenerated into guerrilla actions” (to use Peirats’s words) between commando squads of CNT saboteurs and government forces. Before it tapered off, some 2,000 strikers had been arrested.

This was no ordinary strike. Peirats correctly describes it as a ”‘huelga de la Canadiense’ en miniatura.” To clearly understand its implications, the strike must be placed in the context of the period. The Compania Telefonica National de Espana was not merely a strategic communications network but a huge monopoly owned by American capital. Under the dictatorship a subsidiary of the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation, the Compania Telefonica, had been granted a twenty-year monopoly over all telephonic communications in Spain. After this period, the installations owned by the company could revert to the government, provided that the ITTC was compensated for all the capital it had expended plus 15 percent interest. This staggering compensation had to be paid in gold. To most Spaniards, the Compania Telefonica was a monstrous symbol of foreign imperialism. As recently as 1930 the right-wing Socialist Indaledo Prieto had publicly denounced the contract between the company and the government, calling it systematic robbery and promising that the future republic would cancel its terms. Now Prieto was the republic’s minister of finance and Socialists dominated the Ministry of Labor. If the CNT was seeking to embarrass the republic, particularly the Socialists, it had chosen its target well.

That the government would spare no effort to resist the strike was a certainty. Spain had just gone to the polls to elect the Constituent Cortes, and Azaña was eager to show that the republic was a mature, orderly democracy. Prieto, who was “bending every effort to assure Spain’s [foreign] creditors, stem the export of wealth, and arrest the downward trend of the peseta” (Gabriel Jackson), was more than disposed to forget his militant pledges of a year earlier. Thus the strike was an acute embarrassment to the government. The UGT, meanwhile, had its own bone to pick with the CNT. The telephone syndicate, which the CNT had established in 1918, was a constant challenge to the Socialists’ grip of the Madrid labor movement. Like the construction workers’ syndicate, it was a CNT enclave in a solidly UGT center. Accordingly, the government and the Sodalist Party found no difficulty in forming a common front to break the strike and weaken CNT influence.

The Ministry of Labor declared the strike illegal and the Ministry of the Interior called out the Civil Guard to intimidate the strikers, many of whom were women telephone operators. Shedding all pretense of labor solidarity, the UGT provided the Compania Telefonica with scabs while El Socialista, the Socialist Party organ, accused the CNT of being run by pistoleros. Those tactics were successful in Madrid, where the defeated strikers were obliged to enroll in the UGT in order to retain their jobs. So far as the Socialists were concerned, the CNT’s appeals for solidarity had fallen on deaf ears, although elsewhere workers responded with funds and sympathetic, if ineffective, strikes.

In Seville, however, the strike began to take on very serious dimensions. Late in June, even before the telephone workers walked out, the government had gotten wind of an insurrectionary plot by Anarchists and disaffected air force personnel. According to the government’s account, the purpose of the insurrection was to prevent the forthcoming elections for the Constituent Cortes. This incredible conspiracy apparently included the future caudillo’s volatile brother, Major Ramon Franco, who had moved steadily to the left since his Republican days. General Sanjurjo and “loyal aviators” were dispatched to Seville to abort the conspiracy. Franco was arrested and the local commander of the airdrome relieved of his duties. In nearby villages the government claimed to have found arms that Anarchists had distributed among the peasants.

Scarcely had this conspiracy faded from public attention when, on July 20, a general strike broke out in Seville and serious fighting erupted in the streets. This strike, which also had Communist support, stemmed from the walkout of the telephone workers. It is hard to judge whether the CNT, the FAI, or the Communists (who were following an ultrarevolutionary line in 1931) hoped to turn the strike into an insurrection. There are very few accounts of the Seville strike to be found in Anarchist sources. Again, the government professed to find “evidence” that arms had been distributed to the peasants and, indeed, pitched battles took place in the countryside around the city between the Civil Guard and the agricultural workers. Maura, as minister of interior, decided to crush the “insurrection” ruthlessly. Martial law was declared and the CNT’s headquarters was reduced to shambles by artillery fire. After nine days, during which heavily armed police detachments patrolled the streets, the Seville general strike came to an end. The struggle in the Andalusian capital left 40 dead and some 200 wounded.

These events polarized the CNT as never before. To the moderates, the violent tactics of the previous weeks had produced a needless cleavage between the CNT and the republic—a political system which in their view had opened new possibihtes for Anarchosyndicalist propaganda and the Confederation’s growth. To the FAI, and perhaps the majority of CNT militants, the government’s ruthlessness in dealing with the telephone strikers and the Seville workers was proof that the republic was no better than the monarchy and the dictatorship. The FAI called for all-out social war against the government.

The moderates’ efforts to win the CNT away from the FAI influence became increasingly desperate. The tensions within the organization finally came to a head when in August 1931, thirty moderates signed a vigorous statement denouncing the conspiratorial, ultrarevolutionary policies of the FAI. Although the FAI was not mentioned by name, “El Manifiesto de los ‘Treinta’” (“Manifesto of the ‘Thirty’”), as the document came to be known, denounced the Anarchist organization’s “simplistic” concept of revolution, warning that it would lead to “a Republican fascism.” The republic, said the Treintistas, still enjoyed considerable moral authority as well as armed power, and until that moral authority was destroyed by the government’s own corrupt and repressive practices, any attempted revolution if it succeeded, would lead to a dictatorship by ideologues. “Yes, we are revolutionaries, but not cultivators of the myth of revolution,” declaimed the statement.

We want capitalism and the State, be it red, white or black, to disappear; but we do not want it to be replaced by another.... We want a revolution that is born of the profound sentiment of the people, not a revolution that is offered to us.... The Confederation is a revolutionary organization and not an organization which propagates abuse and riots, which propagates the cult of violence for the sake of violence, revolution for the sake of revolution....

The statement did not alter the course of the CNT. On the contrary, it produced widespread anger which the FAI skillfully used to isolate the moderate wing. The statement, in fact, was the most crucial factor in the downfall of Pestana, Peiro, and their followers. For years the moderates had obscured their skepticism toward demands for immediate revolution in vague generalities on their adherence to Anarchist ideals, thereby leaving the CNT membership unclear about the differences between the moderate wing of the union and the FAI. The Manifesto dispelled this obscurity completely. The Treintistas, it was clear, were opposed to the revolutionary tactics promoted by the FAI, indeed, to any CNT policy that favorably acknowledged such tactics. The camaraderie of common membership in the Confederation had been totally subordinated to visible policy differences—one moderate the other extremist. Mere membership in the CNT could no longer blanket such profound disparities in program and approach and, as Buenacasa was to point out by the 1930’s, it was the FAI’s adherence to a policy of immediate revolution that accounted for its popularity among most Anarchosyndicalist workers.

An outright physical split within the CNT was now merely a matter of time. By September 1931 the FAI, riding on a1 rank-and-file wave of revolutionary enthusiasm, had gained control of Barcelona’s key syndicates; a month later, in October, faistas and hard-line Anarchosyndicalists unseated the moderate editorial board of Solidaridad Obrera and assumed control of the newspaper. The two wings began to trade vituperative insults—the moderates decrying “la dictatura de la FAI,” and the faistas sneering at the moderates as “traidores” and “renegados.” The following year, Pestana was to be expelled by his own syndicate for attacking a CNT uprising in the Llobregat valley. He was to be accompanied by his Treintista comrades and by several syndicates—a miners’ syndicate in Asturias, virtually all the syndicates of Tarassa and Sabadell, and about half of the syndicates in Valencia. Led by moderates, these syndicates were to group together to form a separate federation of their own—Los Sindicatos de Oposicion (Opposition Syndicates)—whose membership probably rarely exceeded 60,000. Finally, in April 1932, Pestana, parting even from his moderate comrades, was to found his own Syndicalist Party, which actually sent two deputies to the Cortes in the elections of 1936.[40]

Most writers on the Spanish labor movement seem to concur in the view that, with the departure of the moderates, the CNT was to fall under the complete domination of the FAI. Cesar M. Lorenzo, in a highly informative work on Spanish Anarchism, speaks of the FAI as the “masters” of the CNT. But is this appraisal really correct? The FAI, as we have already seen, was more loosely jointed as an organization than many of its admirers and critics seem to recognize. It had no bureaucratic apparatus, no membership cards or dues, and no headquarters with paid officials, secretaries, and clerks. According to Brenan, most of its uprisings at this time were hatched.in the Cafe Tranquilidad on Barcelona’s main working-class thoroughfare, although it seems more likely that faistas preferred to use their apartments for serious conspiracies. This informality is significant as a reflections of the faistas’ state of mind. However much they behaved as an elite in the CNT, they genuinely dreaded bureaucracy. They jealously guarded the independence of their affinity groups from the authority of higher organizational bodies—a state of mind hardly conducive to the development of tightly knit, vanguard organization.

The FAI, moreover, was not a politically homogeneous organization which followed a fixed “line” like the Communists and many Socialists. It had no official program by which all faistas could mechanically guide their actions. Its views were usually expressed in statements by the Peninsular Committee. These “communiques” were highly respected by most faistas, but at least in the early 1930s, they made very limited demands upon the independence of the affinity groups. Despite their hortatory accolades to Anarchist ideals and principles, they were usually calls to action. The FAI was not oriented toward theory; in fact, it produced few theoreticians of any ability. Overwhelmingly working class in composition and youthful in age, the organization had its fair share of the shortcomings as well as the admirable qualities of the proletariat everywhere. It placed action above ideas, courage above circumspection, impulse above reason and experience. Gaston Leval has described the FAI as the “passion of the CNT,” and Peirats, in earthier terms, as its “testicles,” but no one, to the knowledge of this writer, has called it the “brain” of the Confederation. And in the early 1930s, as Spain drifted toward civil war, what the FAI needed desperately was theoretical insight and understanding into its situation.

Finally, in the FAI there was no consensus about how to proceed in a revolutionary situation. On this critical issue it contained sharply divided tendencies whose basic disagreements were never fully resolved. Addressing herself to the major tendencies within Spanish Anarchosyndicalism, Federica Montseney, one of the FAI’s luminaries during the Republican period and a scion of the Urales, a famous Anarchist family, notes three currents: “Those known as Treintistas, who formed the right-wing, the anarchists who formed the left-wing, and a third current, the ‘anarcho-Bolsheviks,’ embodied by the group of Garcia Oliver and the playful partisans of ‘one for all,’ who made glancing contact with the theories of the Russian revolutionaries.” His statement; in fact, is rather restrained. The “partisans of ‘one for all’ “ were the Solidarios of the 1920s who had renamed themselves Nosotros (literally, “we”) in the 1930s and included not only Garcia Oliver but Durruti, the Ascaso brothers, and Ricardo Sanz. If we are to accept Peirats’s account of their views, their “contact” with Bolshevism was more than “glancing.” “It was Garcia Oliver who declared himself for the taking of power (prize de pouvoir) in a public lecture which he gave to the woodworkers’ syndicate of Barcelona in January or. February, 1936. He had also made this affirmation beforehand at the very restrained meeting of notables in the editorial board of Solidaridad Obrera.”[41]

This trend, to be sure, did not go unchallenged. Some of the most theoretically gifted and highly respected figures of the FAI sharply opposed Garcia Oliver’s approach. The “A” affinity group, which included such prominent faistas as Jacinte Toryho, Alberdo Iglesias, and Ricardo Mestre, called for the expulsion of the Nosotros group. The Nervo group, led by Pedro Herrara and the Anarchist theorist Abad de Santillan, shared this hostility. It was joined by the “Z” group, a particularly significant affinity group because of its considerable influence over the libertarian youth movement of Catalonia.

Yet if Garcia Oliver’s theory of “seizing power” was not acceptable to the FAI as a whole, there seems little doubt that the putschism implicit in this approach prevailed in practice from the early 1930’s onward. It is not unfair to say that from January 1932 to the beginning of 1933, various FAI groups and eventually the FAI as a whole launched a “cycle of insurrections” that, more than any other single factor, brought down the Azaña coalition.

The first of these insurrections began on January 18, 1932, in the Catalan mining comarcal of the Alto Llobregat. In Figols, Manresa, Berga, Salient, and other towns, miners and other workers seized town halls, raised the black-and-red flags of the CNT, and declared comunismo libertario. After five days, the revolt had been all but crushed, with surprisingly little bloodshed. According to Peirats, Azaña, in a rare spasm of determinaton, gave the commanding general “fifteen minutes to eliminate them [the cenetista workers] after the troops arrived.” Fortunately for the workers, the government forces in the Alto Llobregat were commanded by one Humberto Gil Cabrera, who did not share Azaña’s bloodthirsty aversion for the CNT. In this region, at least, the army’s repression was not notable for its sev^fity. In Barcelona, however, the authorities used a sympathy strike as an excuse to round up hundreds of militants. The repression carried out by the Republican government extended well beyond Catalonia to include the Levant, Aragon, and Andalusia. Thousands of workers were thrown into jails and prison ships in the coastal cities. A month later, over a hundred militants, including Durruli and Francisco Ascaso, were deported to Spanish West Africa and the Canary Islands. Durruti was not to be released until the following autumn.

The deportations were followed by an explosion of protest strikes, some of which lasted well into the spring and escalated the severity of the government’s repression. In Tarassa, the workers staged a small-scale replay of the Alto Llobregat uprisings, seizing the town hall and raising the CNT’s black-and-red flags. The town was swept by street fighting and inevitably by severe repression. The January uprising in the Alto Llobregat was not quite the monumentally revolutionary action it seems to be in the descriptive rhetoric of Federica Montseney. Although highly localized and poorly planned, it was partly a calculated effort by the FAI to enhance its revolutionary reputation among Spanish workers generally and cenetista workers in particular. Peirats leaves us with very little doubt on this score—and not only in the case of the Alto Llobregat insurrections but also in those’ which were to follow. “The extremists [one should read faistas here— M.B.] who expelled the moderates felt an obligation to be revolutionary,” Peirats observes.

In the debates preceding the expulsions, a polarization took place: the revolution was considered to be either near or distant. The pessimism of some led to a kind of optimism in others, just as the cowardice of one who flees increases the bravery of one who pursues. To prove the validity of their Accusations of impotence, defeatism or treason on the part of the moderates, the extremists had to prove their own virility. In the big meetings, where up to 100,000 people gathered, libertarian communism was declared to be within everyone’s grasp. Not to believe in the imminence of libertarian communism was grounds for suspicion.

In the harsh light of the January events, Pestana’s failure to support the FAI’s tactics, indeed his unequivocal opposition to them, was characterized as nothing less than treachery. It was in the aftermath of these events that he was replaced by the faista Manuel Rivas as secretary of the National Committee and finally expelled from his’ own union. At the Catalan regional plenum of Sabadell in April 1932, the walkout of tmVifista-influenced syndicates initiated an outright split that extended from Catalonia, through the Levant, to Andalusia and Asturias. As we have already seen, the treintisla - influenced syndicates thereupon formed their own confederation, Los Sindicatos de Oposicion, with centers in Sabadell, Valencia, and Asturias. Despite their opposition to the FAI, the Sindicatos de Oposicion did not follow Pestana’s trajectory into “syndicalist” politics. In the years ahead they functioned primarily as an oppositional tendency on the periphery of the CNT.

Far from cooling the FAI’s insurrectionary fever, the split that began at Sabadell seemed to heighten it by removing the restraining hands of the moderates. In January 1933, almost a year to the day after the Alto Llobregat events, the FAI dragged the CNT into another insurrectionary adventure. This insurrection was to be initiated by a railway strike of the CNT’s Federation National de la Industria Ferroviaria (FNIF). But the FNIF, riddled with uncertainty and organizationally uncoordinated, kept delaying its decision on a strike date. The FAI, eager to initiate an insurrection, became increasingly impatient. As for the CNT’s leadership, it simply drifted along with events. Virtually all insurrectionary initiatives were left to the FAI-controlled Committees of Defense, a euphemism for the elaborate committee structure composed of Cadres of Defense at local, comarcal, and national levels which Anarchist action groups had created under the umbrella of the CNT and FAI to conduct miltary operations. Indeed, so closely wedded had the CNT and FAI become after the split within the Confederation that Manuel Rivas, the secretary of the CNT’s National Committee, was also secretary of the faista-controlled National Committee of Defense.

Throughout, the police were completely informed about the FAI’s plans and prepared meticulously to counter them. The insurrection began on January 8 with assaults by Anarchist action groups and Cadres of Defense on Barcelona’s military barracks. The Anarchists had expected support from segments of the army rank and file, but the attacks had been anticipated by the authorities and they were repelled with’bloodshed and arrests. Serious fighting occurred in working-class barrios and outlying areas of Barcelona, but the struggle was doomed to defeat. Uprisings occurred in Tarassa, Sardanola, Ripollet, Lleida, in several pueblos in Valencia province, and in Andalusia. They too were crushed without difficulty. In Catalonia, virtually every leading/aisffl, including Garcia Oliver and most members of the FAI’s Peninsular Committee, were arrested. The event was a total calamity. With a certain measure of justice, the CNT denied any part in the insurrection, implicitly blaming the FAI for the disaster. Even the old Anarchist Buenacasa bluntly dissociated Anarchism itself from the FAI’s tactics by angrily declaring: “El faismo and not anarchism provoked the happenings of last January 8 in Barcelona....” In any case, whether or not one regards the FAI’-s insurrectionary fever as creditable, the organization made no attempt to deny its responsibility for the January events.

Despite the defeat, the FAI’s insurrectionary mood had slowly percolated into some of the most remote pueblos of Andalusia where a millenarian ambiance, dating back to a bygone age in the history of Spanish Anarchism, still existed among a number of the peasants. Here, another uprising inadvertently had a profound impact on the destiny of the Azaña coalition. In Casas Viejas, a small, impoverished pueblo not far from Jerez de la Frontera, there still existed an Anarchist “dynasty” headed by a venerable old man in his sixties nicknamed Seisdedos, or “Six Fingers,” who had heard of the uprisings elsewhere in Spain. Inspired by these events, Seisdedos decided that the time had finally arrived to proclaim comutiismo libertario. The old man, his friends, and his relatives—in all a party of little more than thirty— proceeded to arm themselves with cudgels and shotguns and take over the village. Accounts vary from this point onward. According to Brenan, Seisdedos and his party naively marched to the Civil Guard barracks to proclaim the glad tidings. The Guardia, more alarmed than elated by this party of armed peasants, proceeded to exchange shots with Seisdedos, who accordingly besieged them. Eventually, Seisdedos and his group were turned from besiegers into besieged when troops and even airplanes attacked the pueblo, brutally exterminating most of them.

Peirats presents a different account. After Seisdedos and his party had proclaimed comunismo libertario (presumably to the village at large) all “was peace and order until the police arrived.”

They came into the village shooting. Several were left dead in the streets. Then they went into the houses and began to line up prisoners. In the process they came to a hut with a roof of straw and dry branches. They break in. A shot is heard, and a soldier spins. Another shot and another soldier falls. Another is wounded as he attempts to sneak in through the yard. The rest retreat. Who is inside? Old ‘Sixfingers,’ a sixty year old with a tribe of children and grandchildren. The old man will not give up. The others cannot leave without getting hurt. The guards take their positions and receive reinforcements. They use their machine guns and hand grenades. Sixfingers does not give in. He saves his shots and uses them well. Two more guards fall. The struggle lasts all night. Two of the children escape, covered in their retreat by someone who dies riddled with bullets. Dawn is coming and they want to end it once and for all. The hand grenades bounce back, or their impact is cushioned by the thatched roof. The bullets are blocked by the stones. Somebody has an idea. They gather rags, handfuls of cotton, and make balls with them, which they dip in gasoline. Red flashes break the darkness like meteors. The roof crackles and turns into a torch. Soon flames envelop the hut. The machine guns smell blood. Someone comes out, a burning girl. The machine guns leap and leave little fires burning on the ground that smell of burnt flesh. The hut, like an enormous pyre, soon collapses. A sinister cry, a mixture of pain, anger, and sarcasm, echos through the night. And afterwards the quiet silence of the coals. It was over.

The Casas Viejas affair stirred the country to its depths.[42] The image of heavily armed Civil Guards and contingents of the newly formed Assault Guards—the latter ostensibly paragons of Republican legality—wantonly murdering simple, impoverished peasants in a grossly unequal struggle aroused indignation in almost every sector of Spanish society. Initially the government had tried to palm off the event as a mere episode in its chronic war against the lawless Anarchists, but word had spread that no quarter was given to prisoners captured by the Guards. Some fourteen such prisoners had been shot in cold blood by a platoon of Assault Guards under the command of a Captain Rojas. The right gleefully joined the left in condemning the Casas Viejas event and the government, its back to the wall, was obliged to investigate the affair. Captain Rojas was tried and his statements implicated the director general of security in a series-of unsavory orders that were directly traceable to Azaña. The orders “from above,” a subject that was treated rather evasively, called upon Rojas to take no wounded and no prisoners. The Guards were ordered to “shoot for the belly.”

Although the Casas Viejas affair did not in itself bring down the Azaña coalition, it crystallized all the frustrations, resentments, and barbarities that finally caused the government to resign nine months later. The Liberal republic which had begun so brightly and enthusiastically a few years earlier, had satisfied nobody precisely because it followed the path of least resistance—a path which, as Brenan astutely observes, proved to be the path of greatest resistance. The government’s dilemma was obvious almost from the start of its career: it depended on the middle classes and working classes to maintain the facade of Republican virtue, but it could gain the support of one class only at the expense of the other. In time, the republic lost the support of both classes simply by trying to steer a course between them.

Lacking satisfaction in the Azaña coalition, the Spanish middle classes moved increasingly to the right in the hope that Ariarchist violence and labor disorders generally would be definitely repressed. Translated into crass economic terms, this meant that the Spanish bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie, victimized by the world depression of the 1930s, saw its only hope for economic respite in a disciplined, well-mannered, and obedient proletariat whose economic needs would not be too demanding, or impose too grave a strain upffn profit. Azaña tried to demonstrate to the bourgeoisie that working-class collaboration could be achieved by means of political, religious, and trifling economic reforms. Ultimately, despite Socialist support, his “New Deal” for Spain failed miserably and the middle classes veered rightward toward parties that promised a stern government that could safeguard property and provide safety to the propertied classes.

It may well have been that Azaña himself entertained precisely such a stern perspective in the closing months of his stewardship. As Gabriel Jackson points out, “he confided to his diary that deputies of three different parties were proposing a dictatorship as the only solution to continued anarchist risings, and that friends as well as enemies of the Republic were saying that things could not go on this way indefinitely.” One might even suspect that the Socialist bureaucrats on whom Azaña relied as perhaps the firmest pillar of the liberal republic would learn to adapt themselves to such a dictatorship, for they had proved themselves remarkably supple under Primo de Rivera. But the same economic and political forces that were pushing the Spanish middle classes to the right were also pushing the Socialist rank and file to the left. This single fact was crucial. Pressured by Anarchist militancy, by the newly recruited rural masses, and by the underlying instability of the economy, even such tried reformists as Largo Caballero began to veer to the left, if only to retain their influence over their own parties. To this growing radical constituency, the Azaña coalition was a pathetic anachronism, a ruin from a more romantic era when social” harmony seemed to be a greater desideratum than class war.

Finally, the most conspicuous weakness of the Azaña coalition was its inability to resolve Spain’s historic agrarian problem. Obsessed with legality and prudence, the reparto had been slowed to a snail’s pace. Casas Viejas summed up what every Republican knew with aching intensity: the peninsula was on the brink of a peasant war. What must have struck home almost as poignantly as the barbarities of the Guards was the desperation of the peasants. No less sensational than newspaper photographs of strewn bodies was the evidence of the misery that had driven these peasants to sacrifice their lives in so uneven and hopeless a struggle. At Casas Viejas, the Azaña coalition had shown that it could neither produce order without barbarity nor accept barbarity as a means of producing order. Extravagant in repressing rebellious villages, it foundered before a country that was swelling with revolution.

The Spanish Anarchists for their part not only dramatically exposed the Azaña coalition’s vulnerabilities at Casas Viejas; they continued their pressure against the republic through more conventional methods. Although the CNT had been declared an illegal organization after the events of January 1932, the Confederation regained sufficient strength in the spring of 1933 to launch on the most massive strike waves in its history. A plenum of regional Confederations at Madrid in late January and early February resolved to launch a general strike on behalf of amnesty for prisoners and freedom for closed-down and outlawed syndicates and periodicals, and against compulsory arbitration of labor disputes. It can hardly be emphasized too strongly that to a considerable extent, what has so facilely been described as FAI and CNT “adventurism” was a struggle for survival against the republic’s favored treatment of the Socialists.

The UGT, openly abetted by Socialist ministers, civil servants, and their arbitration juries, had made serious inroads into traditional Anarchosyndicalist areas. The CNT had no choice but to reveal the Socialists, not only the Treintistas, as reformists, a “task which was largely spearheaded’ by the much-maligned FAI. The popularity the FAI enjoyed among the more militant cenetistas in the early 1930s was not merely the product of social and economic instability in Spain, but stemmed in no small measure from the FAI’s willingness to do many of the risky and thankless tasks which the staid CNT leaders were reluctant to undertake on behalf of their own syndicates. Mistaken as it surely was in so many of its tactics, the FAI was often more ill-served by CNT leaders (and by recent historians of Spanish Anarchism) than was the CNT by/ai’sta. “adventurism.”

CNT strikes now swept through Catalonia. In mid-April the potash miners walked out in Cardcjna, followed a fe’w days later by the building workers in Barcelona. Shortly afterwards, the dock workers went on strike. Before the spring was out, the city and eventually the country had been rocked by a general strike of nearly all CNT syndicates. Together with these strikes, the CNT launched a massive campaign to release imprisoned CNT-FAI militants whose numbers had now soared to about 9,000. The campaign was marked by immense demonstrations and rallies. In September, this movement reached its peak with a monster rally of 60,000 cenetistas in Barcelona’s huge bull ring. The word “amnesty” appeared everywhere—on posters, as headlines in CNT-FAI periodicals, and on banners in the hands of demonstrators, although no amnesty was declared up to the last days of the Azaña coalition. Although there was little doubt that the right would win the forthcoming elections, Azaña was vindictive enough to turn these immense numbers of Anarchosyndicalist prisoners over to his reactionary opponents.

Ultimately, far more telling in its effect than the strikes was the “No Votad” campaign that the Confederation launched as the November elections drew near. From its printing presses, centros obreros, and syndicate offices, the CNT, eagerly assisted by the FAI, initiated an anti-electoral campaign unprecedented in the history of both organizations. On November 5, at an immense anti-electoral rally of 75,000 workers in the Barcelona bull ring, Durruti shouted: “Workers, you who voted yesterday without considering the consequences: if they told you that the Republic was going to jail 9,000 working men, would you have voted?” The question, by this time, was almost rhetorical; the crowd roared back a vigorous “No!”

This meeting was merely the culmination of months of smaller rallies in almost every city, town, and pueblo within the reach of the CNT; it represented the high point of a poster and press campaign whose essential message, besides “amnesty,” was “No Votad.” The Socialists, who had turned against Azaña by now and decided to launch their own independent electoral campaign, were bluntly rebuffed in their efforts to gain Anarchosyndicalist votes. Warnings that a rightist victory would be followed by a fascist regime evoked a fairly characteristic (and, to this day, alluringly simplistic) reply: fascism would at least compel the proletariat to rise in revolution, whereas a reformist victory would simply lead to a piecemeal but ultimately more debilitating repression. A victory by the right was, in fact, now guaranteed not only by Azaña’s unpopularity but by the stormy anti-electoral campaign of the Anarchosyndicalists. At a FAI plenum held in Madrid during the last days of October, the delegates pressed the need to prepare for an uprising after the elections. The Peninsular Committee warned that “If the [anti-electoral] campaign yields practical results, the FAI must throw itself into the struggle that would follow a rightist victory.” Accordingly, the delegates at the plenum resolved that “the upsurge of all our effectives into Social Revolution must be our answer to any possible reactionary outbreak.” Around the same time, a CNT plenum of Regional Confederations, also held in Madrid, adopted a similar resolution: “That if the fascist tendencies win in the elections, and for this or some other reason, the people become impassioned, the CNT has the responsibility of pushing on this popular desire in order to forge its goal of libertarian communism.”