Part 3, Chapter 5 : Lluís Companys Confronts the CNT, and the CNT Confronts itself

CHAPTER V. Lluís Companys confronts the CNT, and the CNT confronts itself

Meeting participants sent a commission to meet with Lluís Companys. The group included García Oliver, Durruti, and Aurelio Fernández. Strangely, given the short distance to the Palace, they made the trip by automobile. They went to the Plaza de Jaime I and followed the street by that name up to the Plaza de la República. A detachment of Mozos de Escuadra stood at the Palace entrance. There were Assault Guards in the cross streets as well as civilians with Catalanist armbands. The heavily armed CNT and FAI men got out of the car.

The leader of the Mozos de Escuadra greeted us at the entrance of the Generalitat. We were armed to the teeth—rifles, machine-guns, and pistols—and ragged and dirty from all the dust and smoke.

“We are the CNT and FAI representatives that Companys called,” we told him. “Those with us are our guard.”

The leader of the Mozos de Escuadra greeted us warmly and led us to the Pati dels Tarongers [trans.: Orange Tree Courtyard].... we left the guard there, and it became an encampment.

Companys stood to receive us, visibly excited.... The introductions were brief. We sat down with our rifles between our knees. Companys said the following to us:

“First of all, I must acknowledge that the CNT and FAI have never been treated as merited by their true importance. You have always been harshly persecuted. Even I, who had been your ally, was forced by political realities to oppose and persecute you, much as it pained me. Today you are masters of the city and Catalonia. You alone defeated the fascists, although I hope you will not take offense if I point out that you received some help from Guards, Mozos, and men loyal to my party.”

Companys thought for a moment and then continued slowly: “But the truth is that, harshly oppressed until two days ago, you have defeated the fascist soldiers. Knowing what and who you are, I can only employ the most sincere language. You’ve won. Everything is in your power. If you do not want or need me as President of Catalonia, tell me now, so that I can become another soldier in the battle against fascism. However, if you think that in this post—which I would have only left if killed by the fascists—that I, my party, my name, and my prestige can be useful in this struggle—which has ended in Barcelona, but still rages in the rest of Spain—then you can count on me and on my loyalty as a man and politician. I’m convinced that a shameful past has died today and I sincerely want Catalonia to march at the head of the most socially advanced countries.”

.... We had gone to listen. We could not commit ourselves to anything. Our organizations had to make the decisions. We stated this to Companys.... He told us that representatives of all the anti-fascist groups in Catalonia were waiting in another room. If we allowed him to gather us all together, he would make a proposal geared toward giving Catalonia a body capable of continuing the revolutionary struggle until the consolidation of victory. We agreed, in our capacity as intermediaries and reporters, to attend the proposed meeting. This occurred in another room where, as Companys had said, representatives of Esquerra Republicana, Rabassaires, Unió Republicana, POUM, and Partit Socialista were waiting.[514] I don’t remember the names well, either because of the rush, exhaustion, or because I never learned them. Nin, Comorera, etc., etc.[515] Companys explained the advisability of creating a Militias Committee. It would reorganize life in Catalonia, which the fascist uprising had disrupted so profoundly, and organize armed forces to go fight the rebels wherever they might be. Indeed, in those moments of national confusion, the balance of the fighting forces was still an unknown.[516]

Companys made such an obliging speech because he recognized that he had no control over the situation. As a savvy politician, he tried to earn the CNT men’s trust, affirming that there was no way to take a step back. However, events will demonstrate that his real goal was to gain time, as suggested by his conversation with Federico Escofet several hours earlier, by the meeting that he held with Comorera right after speaking with the anarchists, and by the official orders of that night, July 20, which were issued without waiting for the CNT to resolve itself on the creation of the Militias Committee. We have already covered the Escofet exchange. Now we will look at the subsequent evolution of Companys’ Machiavellianism.

According Manuel Benavides, a sympathizer of the Catalan Stalinists, Juan Comorera implored Companys to work behind the scenes to displace the CNT and FAI from the positions they had secured. That coincided with Companys’ political goals:

We should unify our forces and pit the Socialist UGT unions against the CNT. You, Mr. President, would not need to use force at this time. The unions must try to provide revolutionary security and support the formation of military units reporting to the Generalitat. We have to begin building an army. The anarchists and Trotskyists will start to squeal when they find out about this, but we’ll turn a deaf ear. As soon as we have an armed force and recover a solid worker-peasant movement, we’ll run the war on the front and defend the economy in the rearguard, instead of making the revolution, which isn’t our goal for now.[517]

During the evening of July 20, Lluís Companys made an assessment of the day: he considered it so positive that when he met with his advisers he took his proposal to the CNT—to form a “body capable of continuing the revolutionary struggle”—as accepted. Lluís Companys conceived of the organization as a type of popular military-political junta that would answer to the Generalitat’s Ministry of Defense. The decree he drafted that night appeared in the Butlletí Oficial de la Generalitat de Catalunya on July 21. It left no doubts about his political intentions. Some Citizens Militias were created to defend the Republic. Commander Enrique Pérez Farràs would lead them and his political adviser was Lluís Prunes i Sato, the Generalitat’s Minister of Defense. This is the only Generalitat decree on the militias and there is no other—to our knowledge—instituting the Central Committee of Antifascist Militias of Catalonia (CCAMC) and its powers. This indicates that the Generalitat did not legally sanction the CCAMC and that it was therefore an entity imposed by the revolution. Jaume Miravitlles writes that he believes that it was the anarchists who took the initiative to create the CCAMC. As anarchists, they did not want to participate in the Generalitat, because it was a governmental institutional, although it was really the CCAMC that held power at the time. The Generalitat had been reduced to a purely symbolic existence. [518] From all of this, we can conclude that it was the resolutions of the CNT’s historic regional meeting on July 21 that annulled Companys’s conception of the CCAMC. This brings us to that CNT meeting, where the group that had met with Companys reported on their conversations with him.

Anarchism’s detractors have written a lot about the CNT meeting on July 21, but the interested parties have said very little. Any new exploration of the topic suffers from the lack of pertinent documents, which will permit a more in-depth study when they become available. For our part, relying on primary sources, we have tried to form an idea of the climate at the meeting and the character of the speeches.

About the Plenary, Federica Montseny writes:

From the outset, people expressed the desire—rightly or wrongly—to maintain the anti-fascist front formed in the heat of the battle.... It wasn’t indecisive and scared men who created the CCAMC, but men that didn’t feel authorized to do more than search for the best way to continue a struggle that they knew was only just beginning....

[T]he idea of taking revolutionary power did not cross anyone’s mind, not even García Oliver’s, who was the most Bolshevik of all of us. It was later, when the extent of the rebellion and the popular initiatives became apparent, that there was a discussion about whether we could or should go for everything. That is undeniable.[519]

José Peirats says that the question of power posed a dilemma for García Oliver: either go for everything or accept political collaboration. Peirats, abstaining from critical analysis, writes: “We are not going to examine the justness of the appraisal [that there were only two alternatives] here. What is beyond doubt is that the majority of the influential militants interpreted the reality of the moment in a similar way. Dissenting voices were drowned out; the silence of others was truly enigmatic. Between those who protested in vain and those who sheepishly shut up, the collaborationist position took root.” Peirats concludes his discussion of the thorny topic with a number of questions: “Did the militant anarchists and Confederals carefully examine that weighty issue? Did they use every resource to analyze the consequences of such a risky solution? Did they calmly weigh the pros and cons? Did they consider the history of previous revolutions? What is certain is that the collaborationist position triumphed over the ‘go for everything’ or ‘anarchist dictatorship’ stance; which, in reality, wouldn’t necessarily have been fatal.” [520]

García Oliver—a discordant piece in this matter—addressed the delicate question in a letter to us:

I should state that the term all-embracing (in the sense of a radical revolution) is more appropriate than go for everything (a euphemism that I used precisely to avoid the issue of taking of power, which was so in vogue then). The term totalitarian is not applicable, but these issues were touched upon in our writings equivocally then.... If you had been able to read the meeting’s minutes, you would have seen the content of my speech, in which I supported my thesis for more than an hour, and also the impoverished arguments advanced by my adversaries (Santillán, Montseny, etc). Another Assembly-Meeting was held later (almost immediately after the first one), where I reaffirmed my perspective against Marianet’s vagueness (Secretary of the Catalan CNT at the time), who argued that “without going for everything, we can still control the situation from the street.” I had to say that such ideas were not serious at all ... the totality of the revolution’s problems (see what happened in Russia) demanded that the CNT take revolutionary power.[521]

The militants rejected García Oliver’s argument and decided, with the exception of Bajo Llobregat County, to accept political collaboration and “maintain the anti-fascist front formed in the heat of the battle.” The supporters of this view believed that such collaboration would prevent the imposition of a dictatorship.

The CNT’s report at the AIT Congress in December 1937 contains the most concrete defense of their actions. José Xena, David Antona, Horacio M. Prieto, and Mariano R. Vázquez represented the Confederation there. They stated the following:

The Central Committees of Anti-Fascist Militias of Catalonia was created to coordinate the fighting forces on the fronts. Our libertarian movement accepted that Committee, but only after resolving our revolution’s central question: anti-fascist collaboration or anarchist dictatorship. We accepted collaboration. Why? Levante was shaky and defenseless, with a rebel garrison inside its barracks, with groups of workers armed with shotguns and sickles fighting in the mountain. No one knew what was happening in the north and we thought the rest of Spain was in fascist hands. The enemy was in Aragón, at the gates of Catalonia, and we didn’t know the true extent of its strength, nationally or internationally.... We suddenly faced a revolution, and the problem of how to lead and channel it, but were unable to see its full breadth and depth. In those climactic moments, circumstances suggested that we collaborate with the other anti-fascist forces. Bear in mind that the totality of events and political, social, military, geographic, and economic conditions that we have noted constituted the circumstances in this case. Likewise, the anxiety at foreign consulates translated into a heavy presence of warships (French and English) near our ports.... From the very beginning, our revolution had to look to itself. There was no other way. We could not expect anything from abroad. To protect their liberties, lives, and illegitimate interests, no leader of the international proletariat went to prison for helping the Spanish revolution. None lost their lives for standing in solidarity with us. Not one single strike or rebellion has occurred to counteract the asphyxiating pressures that fascist and democratic governments impose upon us. Several thousand workers have come to Spain to share our enormous tragedy, but their sacrifices take place on the margins of global proletarian action.... A people in revolution cannot pause to contemplate. The libertarian movement made the only choice that it could, given the indifference and passiveness of the international proletariat. The revolution had to adapt to the possibilities at hand.[522]

Peirats raises additional questions without responding to any of them, possibly because—as a witness and participant—he knows that he cannot give an impartial answer. Kropotkin says that we should see revolution as a long process of disequilibrium, in which society passes through various experimental stages before reaching an equilibrium. Anarchist’s role, he says, is to prevent a new power from replacing the old, because such a power will necessarily be conservative and counterrevolutionary. [523] Kropotkin is doubtlessly correct and historical experience is instructive here. But it is one thing to theorize and another to confront an event as overwhelming as the Spanish revolution. In this case, militants were in a tremendous rush to resolve the question of power and were unable to appreciate the revolution’s breadth and depth, as noted in the report quoted above. Had they embraced García Oliver’s position, the revolution’s problems would have become clear immediately. Creating the CCAMC was not an error in itself, nor was collaborating with the other revolutionary forces, such as those existing in the UGT and the POUM. What might have been an error was letting the Generalitat stand. Escorza had argued that they could use it to advance the revolution, although it turned out to be its gravedigger. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the Spanish revolution lacked the key ingredient needed for it to become contagious and coherent on a national and international level. The revolution’s success required an effective revolutionary alliance between the CNT and UGT, which is to say—geographically and socially speaking—the Madrid-Barcelona axis. That did not exist on July 19. In Barcelona, as we will see, the proletariat smashed all the bourgeois structures and built the revolutionary foundation upon which the CCAMC could eliminate the Generalitat’s power for several months. But in Madrid, thanks to the Socialist Party, bourgeois structures were left intact and even fortified: a semi-dead state received a new lease on life and no dual power was created to neutralize it. The drama of the Spanish revolution resided in the great weight of anarchism on the one hand and an equally powerful social democracy on the other. The revolution needed to transcend that polarity through a workers’ alliance that would have improvised its own forms of organization. As we will see, these forms emerged everywhere, but they did so in a largely incoherent manner.

Those defeated at this CNT meeting were the strongest supporters of the revolution: Durruti and García Oliver. However, they did not give up. Even though both of these men were bound by organizational decisions, each fought in his own way to deepen the revolution. García Oliver will transcend the boundaries of the CCAMC and Durruti will extend the libertarian revolution through Aragón.