Second Part: The Militant

CHAPTER I. April 14, 1931

Durruti, Ascaso, Liberto Callejas, Joaquín Cortés, and other exiles in Brussels were among the first militants to arrive in Barcelona. García Oliver, Aurelio Fernández, Torres Escartín, and other Solidarios who had been in prison or exiled elsewhere followed closely on their heels.

Echoes of the previous day’s popular celebration were still in the air when Ascaso and Durruti met with Ricardo Sanz on April 15, who had experienced the Monarchy’s last moments and the proclamation of the Second Republic.

Ricardo Sanz enthusiastically told them about the heroic deeds of the CNT, which had expelled the Lerrouxist Emiliano Iglesias from the Civil Government and put Lluís Companys in his place. Durruti and Ascaso were not impressed and must have lamented the contradiction between the CNT’s activity and its public stance. Indeed, the perspective that should have guided its action had been stated clearly in the April 1 issue of Solidaridad Obrera:

Elections, elections, and more elections; this seems to be the supreme solution to all the country’s problems.

We aren’t surprised in the least by this political comedy. We take it for granted that the people’s revolutionary spirit will soften somewhat when they are permitted to play at being councilors and deputies.... The CNT will have to draw useful lessons for the present and not too distant future about the bankruptcy of our supposedly revolutionary politicians.

There is nothing in the events of April 14 that would lead one to conclude that Companys was more revolutionary than Iglesias; both were little more than efficient instruments of the counterrevolution. The fact that some CNT men supported Companys and others of his ilk made it clear there were still contradictory tendencies within the CNT and also an imperious need for political clarification within the organization. It was urgent for the CNT to return to its core mission and, in that context, mark out a clear response to the country’s political and social problems, while ensuring that the new government could not steady itself. This is the framework that will guide a new, decisive stage in Durruti’s life as a revolutionary. From this moment on, his activity will be of a much larger scope and more directly linked to the radicalization of the working class and peasantry.

It was a unique juncture for the anarchist movement. The Republic emerged from a profound crisis that could not be resolved with merely formal solutions. The men who took power were ignorant of the dialectic of history and confused superficial phenomena with the essence of popular sentiment; this is why they erroneously supposed that they could shape the country’s future with simple demagogery. They thought: “after six years of dictatorship, the working people and peasants now give us this proof of ‘civic-mindedness’ by peacefully accepting the regime change. This shows that they trust us and have forsaken their violent methods from the past. To guarantee stability, all the government has to do is control a half dozen anarchist agitators.” This argument was convincing for Miguel Maura and Niceto Alcalá Zamora; as far as they were concerned, the country’s economic and political structures were fundamentally sound. These men were lawyers, not sociologists or historians, and thus assumed that the solution lay in making the state’s laws and the Civil Guard’s rifles effective. Surprisingly, among the members of the new government, there was a Socialist worker leader, two historians, and Marcelino Domingo may have had a rudimentary knowledge of sociology, whereas Nicolau d’Olwer’s had been educated as an economist. Nonetheless, all of these men willingly accepted Maura and Alcalá Zamora’s “logic.”

Durruti, Ascaso, and García Oliver immediately understood the Republican government’s great error and also what role the anarchists should play. There was no chance that the state would greet the explosion of popular enthusiasm that accompanied the Republic’s birth with measures designed to encourage that excitement and confront the country’s problems radically. On the contrary, the state would allow Spain’s deep economic and social problems to discourage the people and strip them of hope. And gradually they would become enraged at the demagogues who had assumed power. The anarchist’s responsibility, then, was to channel this discontent, make it conscious, and give an ideal to the most desperate. Then the revolution would be a real possibility.

The Left, even the Marxists, regarded their extreme anarchist position as a form of revolutionary infantilism. And, likewise, some members of the CNT derisively described them as anarcho-Bolsheviks. The dialectic of history would formulate its verdict on the validity of their stance. To understand what inspired the Solidarios and the FAI to embrace such a radical position, and also to contextualize the dramatic mistakes made by the Republican government, it is necessary to examine the socio-economic state in which the Monarchy left Spain.

According to statistics from 1930, 26 percent of the country’s twenty-four million inhabitants did not know how to read or write. Women suffered this blight most acutely: 32 percent were totally illiterate, although the 19.5 percent illiteracy rate among men was also not very encouraging. Illiteracy was more common in the countryside than the city: 70 percent of the country’s six million agricultural workers could not read or write. [234] We will now see how the agricultural sector broke down, how agricultural workers lived, and the distribution of the land. Lacking more specific data, we will use the averages from the 1930–1935 period, [235] which put the Republic’s meager efforts to remedy the situation inherited from the Monarchy into stark relief. Our point of departure is the population of eleven million active workers among the country’s twenty-seven million inhabitants at the time. With respect to the agricultural sector, we can define that active working population in the following way: 2,300,000 salaried workers (that is, without any land), two million small or medium seized property owners, and one million well-off property owners. These figures reveal that the peasant proletariat was as numerous as the mining-industrial proletariat (2,300,000). Spain remained a predominantly agricultural country, although this observation alone means little without considering the distribution of land.

Steppes of limited agricultural productivity presently cover half the country; 10 percent of the surface is infertile. Rain is rare in thirty-two of the forty-eight provinces; the dry lands (drained) cover seventeen million hectares, and they barely produce 9.3 quintals of durum wheat per hectare, which is half of what the irrigated fields produce. Seven million hectares are not cultivated regularly and the absence of livestock prevents the arable land from being renewed. In some regions the soil is so poor that peasants have to bring hummus from afar to the river’s vicinity. It is estimated that 40 percent of the surface is not sufficiently cultivated. Only the provinces bordering on the Atlantic and Portugal are irrigated well enough to support cattle.

As one can see, irrigation is the most urgent problem. The four great river systems of the territory contribute enough water to irrigate approximately three or four million hectares, but less than half of the government’s development projects are complete. In hopes of serving agriculture and the unemployed but without clashing with the capitalists, Primo de Rivera launched great public works. However, monopolist societies and the landowners control water distribution and sell it at prices that are inaccessible to the peasants. The land remains infertile, and only enriches speculators, who rent it out without granting the right to the precious liquid. Peasants are obliged to buy water bills at any price that they demand. It is only in Valencia where farmers have retained the old institutions of water use and where the Water Judges, peasants themselves, gather in the cathedral’s atrium every Friday to distribute it among the region’s inhabitants and hear complaints from those concerned.[236]

Rabasseire describes land distribution in the following way:

In 1932–33, the Agrarian Reform Institute conducted an investigation in seven provinces: Badajoz, Cáceres, Sevilla, Ciudad Real, Huelva, Jaén, and Toledo. (It excluded Cádiz, the land of the large estates.) Of 2,434,268 agricultural operations, 1,460,160 occupied less than a hectare; 785,810 farms had one to five hectares; 98,794 had an area of six to ten hectares; and 61,971 encompassed fifty hectares. When the land is not irrigated, fifty hectares is very little, especially because the lack of modern equipment imposes a three-year regime of rotating cultivation (many peasants still used the Roman plow). But if we count the farms of less than fifty hectares, we will see that they make up nine tenths of the total rural establishments in these regions. Only 19,400 farms run from fifty to one hundred hectares and only this twelfth of the total has enough land to support those who work it. Of the rest, 7,508 establishments are large domains, among which fifty-five occupy 5,000 hectares each. The area held by these rural properties of more than 250 hectares adds up to 6,500,000 hectares, as the total extension of the 2,426,000 farms of less than 250 hectares does not amount to 4,256,000 hectares.... In the north, in Galicia and Asturias, small farms of less than one hectare are most common.... Many northerners have to emigrate, because the south has enough space to receive the thousands and even hundreds of thousands of colonos[237] ... if the landowners allow it. The property regime in the agricultural sector can be calculated at: some 50,000 landowners own 50 percent of the land; 700,000 well-off peasants possess 35 percent; one million middling peasants own 11 percent; 1,250,000 small peasants 2 percent, and 2,000,000 workers—40 percent of the rural population—have nothing.[238]

How did people in this rural world live? Eduardo Aunós, a government minister during Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship, states: “While they live in misery, the majority of the agricultural workers will not be able to participate in politics; this misery is the foundation of caciquismo.” [239] Altamira, the celebrated historian of the Spanish economy, points out that “in many small valleys, the limited productivity of the land has forced the peasants to preserve a rural communism up to the present. It has proven efficient and is deeply rooted in the people’s psychology.” [240] Costa thinks that almost all of Spain’s problems have their origin in the iniquitous distribution of wealth, especially the land. [241] Flores Estrada, the great early nineteenth century economist and reformer, shows that the seizure of the land by certain individuals prevents the majority of humankind from working. “In provinces where there’s a land registry, it has been tallied that 84 percent of the small property owners earn less than one peseta daily,” writes Rabasseire. Likewise, Gonzalo de Reparaz bemoans the misery in Andalusia: “From Cartagena to Almería, we are witnessing one of the most appalling European tragedies. Hundreds of thousands of human beings are dying in slow agony.” [242] “Others declared that it was impossible to build housing unless salaries were increased; in the countryside, and even in the small villages, people use huts, caves, and caverns for shelter. In a word: almost the entire rural population is forced to live in conditions unworthy of a human being.” [243] Just as we see the Monarchy’s hand in the origin and maintenance of feudal structures in the rural world, we also see its presence in the government’s orientation toward industry. Carlos I, after crushing the nascent bourgeoisie in the Comunidades de Castilla (1522), concluded that he needed to stop the emergence of an industrial and commercial bourgeoisie at all cost in order to sustain monarchical absolutism. The alliance between the Monarchy and the rural and military aristocracy dates from that period, as does Spain’s resultant impoverishment and decline. Rather than encourage the development of a strong and cultured bourgeoisie, Carlos I preferred to buy the products needed to support the colonization of the Americas and Spain itself in France, Belgium, or wherever else he could find them. This policy necessarily produced a disregard for manual labor and an increased taste for military, ecclesiastic, and literary careers. Scientific and mechanical studies were erased from the curriculums of Spanish universities. The Bourbons rigorously observed this political line drawn by the Hapsburgs, with the brief exception of Carlos III. [244] The political course that Spain followed since the sixteenth century could have only one result for its economic-industrial structure: it yielded an unequal and capricious industrial development, structured around the interests of the Kings and their favorites, and ensured that foreign capitalists would have the exclusive right to exploit mines, industry, electricity, railways, and telephone lines. The state gave to foreign capitalists what it denied Spanish capitalists, whose industrial initiative was asphyxiated by the iron corset of state monopolies.

“The Bank of Spain is organized in such a way that all the country’s profits end up in the pockets of those holding power. The big firms, banks, large industry, and transportation serve the state as an instrument of its plunder. The big firms hold the state captive and the state has imprisoned the nation. The economy is atrophied and the state hyper-atrophied; these are the factors that determine the country’s situation. The state absorbs a third of the national income, 60 percent of which—that is to say, two-ninths of the national revenue—is used to maintain the state’s repressive apparatus.” [245] With small and medium-sized industry controlled by the monopolies and strangled by excessive customs taxes and transport fares (true shackles of all development), the Spanish population’s standard of living could not improve, especially when more than half—its agrarian and peasant sector—fell outside the circuit of consumption. As a result, “Spain is disastrously backward in relation to other countries. Of the four thousand lead mines, only three hundred operate, and only a quarter of the rainfall is utilized. In Spain, 5,000 or 6,000 million tons of coal lay under thin layers of sand and yet not more than six to nine million are extracted each year. And the mineral riches do not stay in the country. Of the 2,700,000 tons of iron mineral extracted, England buys a million and other foreign countries an equal quantity. “Altogether, mining production reaches levels on the order of 1,000 million gold pesetas; industrial production approaches 7,000 million, of which 2,000 million come from the textile industry; and agrarian production reaches 9,000 million. This indicates that more than half of national production is agricultural. The same proportions are also evident in the workforce: there are four to five million people working in industry and the mines, and five to six million (three million peasants and two million salaried workers) in agriculture.” [246] We must now ask: who were arrayed against those eleven million laborers who consumed so little and lived so poorly in the countryside as well as the city? The ten thousand landowners who owned half of Spain’s agricultural property; the financial-political oligarchy; the speculators (commercial intermediaries); the large industrialists, with their retinue of caciques; a military and ecclesiastical caste; and other parasites who lived in idleness thanks to interest and monopolies.

Between these classes—one quite small and the other enormous—there was an abyss. No common project could unite them. Alcalá Zamora had been mistaken: there was no mesocracy to soften the contrast between the few who made hunger exist and the majority who suffered it. “The middle term between what?” asked Miguel de Unamuno. “Spain has never known the middle class.” [247]

In this mosaic of so-called social classes, there was also the intellectual.

The clergy was by far the most numerous of the group, with its approximately 100,000 people who lived at the country’s expense in one way or another and constituted its most reactionary sector. After the church intellectuals, there was the teaching corps, with its bosses and subordinates. The bosses (the mandarins) were the ardent Catholics, as Menéndez Pelayo described them. The “subordinates” came from that petty bourgeois population of store keepers, pharmacists, and small manufacturers who partially filled the ranks of the leftwing Esquerra Catalana and Manuel Azaña’s Republican Left. We must finally add the students, the promise of the future, whose prospects were ambiguous and who could as easily opt for socialism as fascism. The latter movement began to make its appearance in Spain through the theorists Ramiro Ledesma Ramos, Ernesto Giménez Caballero, and Onésimo Redondo, who were articulating their views in early 1931 in the periodical La Conquista del Estado. [248] The only part of the population that really enjoyed life was made up by one million people, between the bureaucrats, priests, soldiers, intellectuals, large bourgeoisie, and landowners. The rest was the “rabble.” When Miguel Maura spoke of defending “legitimate conservative principles,” he meant the preservation of those feudal structures that impeded the country’s economic development. To maintain and defend them was to subject the peasant to a slow death, with salaries that went from 1.5 to three pesetas for a workday lasting from sunrise to sunset, which is to say, for twelve to fourteen hours of labor (and only for a quarter of the year). The anarchists were prepared to respond to these contradictions and use them to their advantage. They were not idealists. They had a realistic view of the situation and had many reasons to believe that they could trigger a revolution and guide it with a libertarian communist program adapted to the radical spirit of the working class and peasantry.

But naturally they could not unleash the revolution overnight. They had to organize it and make the workers and peasants conscious of its necessity. Written propaganda would play a very important role in this, because it enabled anarchists to elucidate how a libertarian communist society could function. The masses needed to be able to envision a new economy, new work relationships, and a federation of internally autonomous neighborhoods. The high rates of illiteracy made such propaganda very difficult and so they set out to end that social blight. They intended to do so with “rationalist” day schools for the youngsters—which practiced what today is called “anti-authoritarian pedagogy”—and night schools for the adults, which were installed in the unions and libertarian ateneos and actively encouraged. As a result of this, the CNT’s unions and the libertarian ateneos became not only instruments of struggle, but also centers of proletarian education and cultural development.

Opponents both inside and outside the CNT criticized the FAI anarchists. Some called them “impatient revolutionaries.” Others, the Marxists, accused them of being ignorant of history and told them that it was impossible to skip stages of historical development. “Spain’s revolution,” they said, “has to be political not social; that is, it has to be democratic-bourgeois.” Anarchists replied to this outlandish argument by saying that the Spanish bourgeoisie had already had its chance to make a democratic-bourgeois revolution and it failed. It was now the proletariat’s turn to make its revolution. [249]