11: The Bourgeois Republic

The Second Spanish Republic was declared on 14 April 1931. The people of Spain who saw in it the engine of change and the promise of new beginnings welcomed it with enormous popular enthusiasm. Article No. 1 of the new Constitution read:

‘Spain is a democratic republic of workers of every class, organized in a regime of liberty and justice. The powers of all its organs emanate from the people. The Republic represents an integral State, compatible with the autonomy of the municipalities and regions.’

The CNT leadership had contributed much to the new Republic. In a truly Pilatesque speech Joan Peiró confirmed, with obvious satisfaction, that the CNT had acted as midwife to the Republic:

‘Our subversive labor from Solidaridad Obrera and from the tribunes, contributed directly to the electoral triumph of 12 April 1931… We never said to the workers that they should go to the polls; but neither did we say keep away.’[89]

Their enthusiasm for the Republic, however, quickly transcended the boundaries of their functions as mere spokesmen for the anarcho-syndicalist union. Having been so closely involved with other political parties in anti-dictatorship and republican plots over the years many of the CNT leaders had come to believe in the Republic as an abstract impersonal machine, not something of human origin serving specific ruling class interests. Concerned now with the success of the Republic for which they had sacrificed so much and on which so many hopes were pinned, many of the CNT leaders became absorbed and sidetracked by the desire to be ‘practical’. The Republic, they hoped, would provide a framework of stability in which the Confederation could thrive in an atmosphere of class harmony. What they overlooked was that the ‘success’ of the Republic, i.e. the piecemeal resolution of the problems of capitalism and arbitrary authority by compromise, chicanery, dissimulation and self-deception, was the concern of republicans, authoritarian socialists and enlightened conservatives — but not anarchists! The task of anarchists was to constantly challenge, to a greater or lesser degree according to the nature of the government in power, established authority. Anarchists moved as free and independent agents, outside the authority system, sharing the sacrifices and revolts of the people, not their weaknesses, compromises and surrenders.

For some time bourgeois politicians, particularly in Catalonia, had been cultivating union leaders such as Pestaña. Their objective was to ensure a healthy and stable investment climate by winning the passive or active collaboration of a CNT which had been neutered and transplanted from its historic roots and which they hoped to tie into the apparatus of power. As early as 13 April Pestaña had been offered a cabinet post in the new Catalan government by Macià, leader of the Esquerra, a Catalan petty bourgeois nationalist party disguised as socialists. The reformists grew more assertive by the day. On 14 May Solidaridad Obrera, under Joan Peiró’s editorship, announced:

‘We have stated that the CNT is not against the Republic. Furthermore, conscious of that which it represents in the soul of the masses, the CNT has agreed to oppose, by all means available to it, any rising which the reaction might attempt. Whether we want to or not the consequence of the CNT’s policy obliges us to defend the Republic.’[90]

April 1931 constituted a political revolution for which the old order had been totally unprepared. It had been anesthetized and disoriented by the rapidity with which events had developed, but its economic and social power bases remained unchallenged. For the Republicans and authoritarian socialists their ultimate goal of a liberal democratic Republic had been achieved, they had reached the end of the line; their revolution was over. For the anarchists, whose goal was a classless society in which the exploitation and oppression of man by man had been eliminated, it was only the first way station on the road to Libertarian Communism. So far as they were concerned the only thing the CNT should defend was the working class. If this meant supporting the Republic so be it.

One of the charges leveled against the anarchists by liberal and Marxist historians is that anarchist intransigence was one of the contributory factors which undermined the Republic and led to economic, social and political overload on the system, that the people were making demands which neither the newborn state nor capitalism could hope to meet, and hence the credibility and future prospects for the stability of liberal democracy in Spain were steadily eroded to the point of complete collapse.

How well does this charge stand up to analysis? The widespread discontent with the policies of the Second Republic was not a problem unique to Spain in the 1930s, nor was it attributable to anarchist intransigence. The problems of the Spanish Republic were ones of political alienation which arose (and have subsequently grown increasingly acute in the Western democracies) from the contradictions and tensions inherent in the unholy alliance between the bourgeois liberal concept of the State, as a mechanism for facilitating control over the system in the interests of the capitalist class, and the working-class ideal of democracy as essentially egalitarian and participatory. Popular disenchantment and frustration with the political process was inevitable and had nothing to do with anarchist intransigence. The anarchists were simply the only ones willing to publicize these contradictions. They were not prepared to pander to the illusion that democracy and capitalism were compatible.

With the democratic surge of April 1931 the people’s long-standing expectations of social change became a direct challenge to the complex power structure. Agrarian reform and the breakup of the large estates, the fundamental problem of the Republic, which cried out for a solution, was one that could never be tackled within the framework of the parliamentary system. Neither did the political parties of the Republic have the capacity or will even to attempt to resolve it. The weak and vacillating bourgeois politicians understood only too well that to do so would being them into direct conflict with the enormously powerful landed interest that had the ideological support of the church and the military support of the army. The whole class-conflicted, discordant structure would collapse.