Collectivizations in Alcoy

‘So far as collectivizations are concerned, Alcoy seems to me the most conclusive example and the one with the most lessons. The second largest town in the province of Alicante, it had a population of 45,000 in 1936. It was an industrial and commercial center of some importance. The total number of industrial workers was 20,000, a very high proportion for a country where the active population nationally was from 33 per cent to 35 per cent. Textile production, which supplied not only fabrics but also hosiery, and ladies’ underwear, was the most advanced, and employed a fairly large complement of women. Paper-making came second …

On July 18, 1936, rumors of the impending fascist attack which were rife throughout Spain also found an echo in Alcoy. They expected an attack by the military and the conservatives supported by the Civil Guard; our forces mobilized to meet the attack and took up combat positions in the streets. But the attack did not take place. So our forces who, by their initiative had outflanked the local authorities, turned to them and presented certain demands mainly motivated by the unemployment in the textile industry (our Syndicate at the time had 4,500 members, soon to become 6,500). These demands, without breaking the antifascist unity, were for assistance for the unemployed and control over industrial enterprises. All the demands were agreed to.

But new difficulties soon loomed. The employers were quite prepared for the workers’ control commissions to examine their books where transactions of purchases and sales, profits and losses were presumably correctly entered. But the workers, and more especially the syndicates wanted to go further. They wanted to control the whole capitalist mechanism which absurdly held back production when there were people insufficiently clad, and which created an unemployment which could not be accepted seeing that there was an insufficient demand. And very soon they came to the conclusion that they would have so seize control of the factories, and change everything in society.

Furthermore, the employers soon declared their inability to pay wages to the unemployed, which in that critical period was probably true. One part of the factories appeared to be insolvent because of the crisis and could not even pay the workers who were at work. So much so that the point was reached in this absurd situation where the employers asked the workers’ associations to advance them the cash to pay the unemployed.

So, the Syndicate of the workers in the textile industry, whose history we know best of all, nominated a commission which studied the situation and presented a report in which it concluded that the textile industry of Alcoy found itself in “a situation of systematic paralyzes, financial bankruptcy and of absolute deficiency administratively and technically.”

This determined the decisive step taken: on the proposal of the Syndicate, control commissions in the textile industry transformed themselves into management committees. And on September 14, 1936, the Syndicate officially took over 41 cloth factories, 10 thread, 8 knitting and hosiery factories, 4 dying, 5 finishing, 24 flock factories as well as the 11 rag depots. All these establishments constituted the whole textile industry in Alcoy.

Nothing remained outside the control and management of the Syndicate. But we must not imagine hiding behind this name were simply a few higher, bureaucratic committees making decisions in the name of the mass of unionists without consulting them. Here, too, libertarian democracy was practiced… There were five general branches of work and workers. Firstly, weaving, employed 2,336 workers; then thread making with 1,158 skilled men and women; knitting and hosiery employed 1,360 and carding another 550.

At the base, the workers in these five specialties chose at their factory meetings the delegates to represent them in integrating the factory committees. One then finds these five branches of work, through the intermediary of the delegations, in the management committee of the Syndicate. The general organization rests, therefore, on the one hand on the division of labor and on the other on the synthetic industrial structure.

Before expropriation took place, the enterprise committees consisted only of representatives of manual workers; later a delegate from the office staff was added and another from the stores and depots for raw materials. The role of these committees now consisted in directing production according to instructions received and emanating from the assemblies, to transmit to the committees and responsible sections of the Syndicate reports on the progress of work, to make known the needs for new technical material and of raw materials. They also had to pass on large invoices and pay the small ones.

But the representatives of these five branches of work constituted only a half of the management committee. The other half consisted of the Control Commission nominated by the Syndicate committee and by the representatives of the manufacturing sections.

The technical commission was also divided into five sections: administration, sales, purchases, manufacture, insurance. It was provided with a general secretary to ensure an indispensable co-ordination…

The personnel of the whole industry was divided into specialties; manual workers, designers and technicians. Orders were not distributed and the work involved in carrying them out not discussed without first consulting the factory technicians themselves. Decisions were not taken from above, without seeking information from below. If, for instance, a special cloth had to be manufactured containing more cotton than wool, or vice versa, five of the most able mechanics among them would be called in to consider if, and where, the technical means of production existed, and in what way they could be used. As to the manual workers, they accomplished their tasks as scrupulously as possible; they participated in the responsibilities at the level of their activities; if necessary they informed the technical sections, through the works committee, of the difficulties which arose in carrying out their part of the work.

Every Monday, in each factory, the designers, technicians, and worker delegates met, examined their books and the accounts of the enterprise, the production figures, quality of work, orders in hand and all that made up the common effort. These meetings did not take decisions but their results were communicated to the corresponding union section.

The machines sub-section had as its objective to deal with the maintenance of the mechanical equipment and the buildings in which they were housed. It ordered the repairs asked for by the works committees, but had to consult the Technical Commission when the costs exceeded a fixed ceiling.

The control sub-commission for manufacture and statistics prepared reports on the individual balance sheets of each factory or workshop, on the return from raw materials, on experiments in new uses of materials, and the special problems created by then in the distribution of work and manpower, the consumption of power involved, and all other connected matters which could orientate production in general. It also recorded the transfer of plant from one factory or workshop to another.

The administrative sub-section was divided into three sections: counting house, accounts, urban and industrial administration. The counting house dealt with payments connected with the local textile industry in general, on the instructions given by the director of the corresponding sections. But on the other hand he had to have the agreement of the factories he dealt with.

The second section recorded administratively all purchases, sales, credit, etc., effected … Finally, the subsection for urban and industrial administration dealt with the payment of contributions and rents and on all insurance matters involving accidents, and with maintaining permanent relatioms with the libertarian Friendly Society of the Levante…

In this huge co-ordinated and rationalized organization the union was therefore the directing organism which encompassed everything. The general assemblies which every single worker was entitled to attend passed judgment on the activities of the Technical Commission and of the sections that sprang from the Factory Committees. It was the union which also assumed the juridical and social responsibility both for the expropriation undertaken and the general management. It established the rate of remuneration and co-ordinated all activities on a higher level in the collective interest.

As we have already pointed out, the other industries in Alcoy were organized and administered in the same way as the textile industry. The whole organization was in the hands of the unions. And the union was in the hands of the workers who effectively participated in the organization of the industry — and not only of the factory — and rose to the collective responsibilities in the individual sense.

They were hard at work in the engineering workshops I visited, and they too were organized on the principles of libertarian democracy and syndicalism. They had even successfully improvised an armaments industry to assist the armed struggle. The improvements favorably surprised some technically qualified visitors, and the government placed orders for the army.

On the other hand, paper making met with difficulties resulting from a decrease in reserve of raw materials. Once again one can see that if this experiment had taken place under more favorable circumstances the results would have been very much more successful than they were.

Nevertheless, the solidarity of the libertarian organizations allowed the printing, paper and cardboard unions to meet the difficulties. In fact, the sixteen other unions that composed the local federation in Alcoy gave financial assistance (since the money system was retained) to industries which were in the red. They had conquered the narrow corporate spirit, even of narrow corporate unionism.

The organization of production was technically excellent in Alcoy at the time when I studied it, and as generally happened, it is probable it went on improving. The weak point was, as in other places, the organization for distribution. Without the opposition of tradesmen and the political parties, all alarmed by the threat of complete socialization, who combated this “too revolutionary program”, it would have been possible to do better. This opposition obliged them to create their own antifascist control committee which had no combative role to play, but under this guise centralized the purchases of agricultural products, paying on the hand less to the peasants for their products, and on the other holding down prices and the cost of living. It was not an easy matter to assert themselves so as to avoid friction among the anti-Francoist sectors. For the socialists, republican, and communist politicians sought to prevent our success, even to restoring the old order or maintaining what was left of it.

Nevertheless, in Alcoy, 20,000 workers (3,000 of whom belonged to the UGT), administered production through their unions and proved that industry functions more economically without capitalists or shareholders and without employers fighting among themselves and thereby preventing the rational use of technical plant — just as the chaos in individual agriculture prevented the rational use of the land and the means of agricultural production …’[125]