Chapter 16 : Legitimacy Crisis

16: Legitimacy Crisis

By 1932 it was clear to all sections of the population that liberal democracy was not working the way it was supposed to. Dissatisfaction with government affected everyone, cutting across class and regional lines. The politicizing effect of the democratic surge that accompanied the Republic had led the people to make political demands on the State that could not be met. Disappointment was inevitable and confidence in the Republic began to wither.

The year 1932 was dominated by uninterrupted agrarian and industrial unrest. Strikes and violent confrontations were a daily occurrence. The specter of revolution haunted the agrarian, industrial and commercial bourgeoisie and the semi-feudal landed elite of Spain alike. On 29 May a National Plenum of CNT Regionals had organized a successful nationwide day of protest against governmental repression and anti-CNT legislation such as the jurados mixtos. The Law of Professional Associations, passed on 8 April, had been seen as a further deliberately provocative attack by the government on the CNT.

Although the press, including the socialist press, referred constantly to anarchist unrest, the activism credited to FAI manipulation was, in fact, a reflection of the degree of working-class militancy and the strength of popular feeling. In the rural areas, for example, it was not unknown for the landless workers to constitute themselves into a casa del pueblo, a cross between a trades council and a community center, and affiliate to every revolutionary organization they could think of — anarchist, socialist and communist. As Paul Preston notes:

‘The essential harshness of conditions created a solidarity which rose above the rivalries of the various political factions.’[150]

The semi-feudal and fundamentalist right, meanwhile, had recovered from the shock of the Republican victory the previous April. Fearing the bourgeois center would be unable to hold out much longer against an increasingly ungovernable working class in a revolutionary frame of mind, they began to plan the restoration of their political power. In August, General Sanjurjo, ex-director of the Civil Guard and commander of the carabineros, also an aristocrat, launched a military coup. The rebels were defeated in Madrid when they attempted to seize the Ministries of War and Communications. In Seville, Sanjurjo had greater success. In the face of widespread apathy and, in some cases, collusion on the part of the local authorities, the CNT called a general strike. Anarchist defense groups attacked and burned the meeting places of the big landowners, employers and rightists. The Defense Committee formed a Revolutionary Committee that called the people out onto the streets. CNT and FAI defense groups attacked and burned the meeting places of the big landowners, employers and rightists. The insurgents were routed. The quick response of the libertarians had mobilized the population to defeat the rebellion and, paradoxically, to save the Republic.

As 1932 drew to a close the social revolutionary objectives and anti-parliamentary principles of the biggest labor union in Spain appeared to express the mood of the Spanish working-class. Durruti, recently released from prison for his part in the Figols uprising, addressed a mass audience at a meeting to launch a FAI propaganda campaign at the Palace of Fine Arts in Barcelona on 1 December 1932:

‘Your presence at this meeting and my presence on this platform show the bourgeoisie and government clearly that the CNT and FAI are forces which increase with repression and grow in adversity… The Republican socialist government thought that with the deportation of a hundred or more workers that the CNT would knuckle under. Acting as it did, it showed once again its ignorance of social reality and the reason for the existence of anarchism. The bourgeois press has applauded the government’s move, the deportations, thinking that once the leaders were exiled the sheep would go back to the sheepfold. In other words, the dog killed, the rabies would disappear. The bourgeois scribblers were mistaken, just like the government itself… the Spanish working class is not a herd of sheep offering their necks so that a yoke can be placed upon them.

‘Such dreadful things have been said about me, as well as about my comrades in deportation, believing that I would be discredited, but the effect was entirely the opposite… To fight us they have used the worst weapons. The theory of the “leaders” of the CNT is identical to the “scoundrels” of the FAI…

‘Those whom the bourgeoisie call “leaders” are workers whom all the world knows and their way of life is identical with that of every unfortunate worker. The way they differ is that they have the courage to choose the worst position in the struggle, to be in the front line to stop a bullet or fill the prisons. The real bandits, the real scoundrels, are the politicians who need to fool the workers and put them to sleep while promising them a month of Sundays so as to wrest their votes from them, which will bring them to the Cortes and will permit them to live like parasites on the sweat of the workers…

‘For the government, it was a political error to exile us, for they paid for our trip to the Canaries so that we could make anarchist propaganda…

‘Another argument used against us is that we are in the pay of the monarchists, that we play the game of reaction by fighting the Republic. The attitude of the CNT in Seville shows that this argument is also lame. It is the second time that the CNT has saved the life of the Republic. But the Republicans should not fool themselves. Sanjurjo said that “the anarchists will not succeed” and the anarchists did succeed and Sanjurjo had to “bite the dust”. Let the

‘The Republican Socialists should know that they must either resolve the social problem or else it will be the people who will do it. We think that the Republic cannot resolve it. Also, we say this clearly to the working class that there is now only one dilemma: either to die like modern-day slaves, or to live like admirable men, on the straight path of social revolution.

‘You then, workers who are listening to me, know what to expect. The change in the course of your lives depends on you.’[151]

Durruti’s impassioned speech was well received. The Republic, lacking any real power base in the country, faced an impossible task; it had failed completely to live up to the expectations of the Spanish working classes. It was clearly unable, or unwilling, in the face of resolute opposition from the still unchallenged and powerful landed interest, to implement the long hoped-for agrarian reforms which would bring Spain into the modern age.

By October 1932 CNT membership had jumped, in one year, from 800,000 to over a million. Many of these had been recruited from among the increasingly disillusioned members of the socialist UGT rank and file. Draconian repression and the anti anarcho-syndicalist legislation of the socialists and republicans, coupled with the hostility and constant harassment and intimidation of the newly created Generalitat government of Catalonia, left the CNT with few options. Two solutions presented themselves — the anarcho-syndicalist one, with its emphasis on building up the organization in the hope that constant working-class pressure for an increasingly more rational and just society would finally open the doors to a society without the persecution or exploitation of man by man, or the ‘cavalry charge’ option with its strategy of constant direct frontal attacks aimed at weakening the system, educating the people and building a revolutionary self-confidence which would one day allow them to throw off the shackles of state and property and begin to build a more just society.

Spurred on by the explosive atmosphere and the heady revolutionary consciousness which had built up steadily since the Alto Llobregat rising at the beginning of the year, the joint CNT-FAI defense cadres (cuadros de defensa), under the national and local defense committees, prepared to launch a coordinated national revolutionary insurrection. It was the only viable option in the face of the continuing provocations of the Madrid and Catalan governments. Both governments had adopted the elitist, pestañista, line that the CNT was simply a pawn in the hands of the FAI, and had, since early in the year, systematically attempted to break anarchist influence in the CNT. Confederal newspapers had been suspended and preventive detention introduced, while CNT militants were being beaten up and tortured in the secret detention centers operated by the Esquerra.

The rising was scheduled to take place on 8 January 1933, almost exactly a year after the first rising in Alto Llobregat. [152] A nationwide general strike of railway workers was to provide the backdrop for the planned insurrection. Paralyzes of the rail network would, it was hoped, cause maximum economic disruption and limit the government’s ability to move troops to cope with the concerted risings in widely dispersed urban and rural areas.

But, when members of the Catalan Regional Defense Committee of the CNT met to finalize the arrangements for the rising with the CNT’s National Committee, they were surprised to find that this body, at the last moment, wanted the insurrection called off. The Catalans refused to call it off and insisted on going ahead as planned.

One of the keys to the confusion and disaster that followed was the overlapping memberships of the main protagonists in the relevant committees. Manuel Rivas, both National Secretary of the CNT and Secretary of the National Defense Committee, disagreed with the Catalan Regional Defense Committee’s optimistic assessment of the situation. But his revolutionary and personal loyalties outweighed his critical judgment and he agreed to cooperate — in the belief the Catalan Defense Committee was acting in the name of the Regional Committee of the CNT.

The Catalan Regional Defense Committee, however, was acting on its own initiative. Rivas’s role was to advise all the regional organizations, in accordance with a CNT National Committee circular of 29 December, that Barcelona had risen in revolt and they were to follow suit. [153]

The Catalan Regional Defense Committee consisted, primarily, of members of the Nosotros group, Durruti, Oliver and Ascaso. Durruti, representing the CNT’s National Defense Committee, had traveled to Andalucia at the beginning of the year to take part in a CNT conference and to coordinate plans for the revolt. Everything hinged on Barcelona. If the movement failed there the whole thing was to be aborted.

The premature explosion of two bombs close to the central police headquarters in Barcelona forced the insurgents’ hand. Joint CNT and FAI Defense Cadres attacked a number of barracks in the Catalan capital but the authorities had been fully informed of the insurrectionary plans and were waiting for them to make their move. What had been intended as a surprise operation turned into a well-prepared trap. On the morning of 8 January Premier Azaña noted in his diary:

‘At 11am this morning, Casares [Casares Quiroga, minister of the interior] telephoned me that according to all indications, the anarchist movement that we were waiting for would be launched today, late in the afternoon. Their plans are to assault the military barracks at Barcelona, Zaragoza, Seville, Bilbao, and other points. Something is also expected in Madrid, but of less importance. I am sending instructions to divisional generals.’[154]

The railway workers, most of whom belonged to the UGT, failed to come out on strike. Their national union leaders had sided with the UGT executive. The Catalan leaders of the rebellion, including García Oliver and Gregorio Jover, were arrested in the opening stages; by noon the insurrection in Barcelona had been crushed. Neither the soldiers in the barracks nor the populace at large responded to the call to revolution.

In the meantime, however, Manuel Rivas, in his capacity as secretary of the National Defense Committee, had telegraphed the other Regional Committees informing them that Catalonia had risen. Although he signed the telegram in his name only, not as national secretary of the CNT, it was assumed that the information came in the name of the National Committee, not the National Defense Committee. On receipt of this telegram the Levante and Andalucia Regional Committees instructed their affiliates to follow suit. The anarchist-oriented paper La Tierra had also carried premature reports that day that the insurrection was spreading quickly throughout the peninsula and that a general strike was in progress. Before the mistake could be rectified, the local Defense Groups in a number of districts had begun to move into action to declare Libertarian Communism.

In the Catalan town of Ripollet the anarchists seized the town hall, unfurled the black-and-red flag of the CNT and proclaimed universal fraternity and the abolition of money, private property and the exploitation of man by man. They then proceeded to burn all the legal archives, especially property deeds, in the main square. Libertarian Communism was also declared in Valencia and Lérida as well as the villages of Ribaroja, Bétera, Pedralba and Bugarra. These isolated local movements were soon quashed by the prompt arrival of government forces from surrounding areas. In Andalucia, events led to what was to become an infamous incident in the small, impoverished township of Casas Viejas.

On the morning of 11 January, unaware that the rising had been crushed elsewhere throughout the peninsula, representatives of the local FAI group, Libertarian Youth organization and CNT sindicato called on the mayor of Casas Viejas to inform him that Libertarian Communism had been declared and that his services as a functionary of the state were no longer required. [155] Given the distorted interpretations of the Casas Viejas rising it is important to stress that it should be seen in the context of an organized nationwide uprising and not the spontaneous action of a small isolated group of local enthusiasts staging a declaration of ‘village independence characteristic of the millenarian tradition of rural anarchism’, as is maintained by bourgeois and Marxist writers. [156] Eduardo de Guzmán, anarchist editor of La Tierra, recorded the full tragedy of what followed:

‘For a number of hours the workers were masters of the village and Libertarian Communism was declared. From 7am until 4pm they had reason to believe that the revolution throughout Spain had been successful. The red-and-black flag fluttered in the breeze; armed peasants were in control of the situation. During those fleeting hours of victory it never occurred to the workers to wreak vengeance on anyone, destroy anything or molest anyone who may, possibly, have been their enemies. There were several caciques (political bosses) in the village, along with their families. No one was molested nor were any demands made of any of them; all were treated with respect. The same applied to the few shops as well as the church and its priest. Libertarian Communism began, as in every other village in which it had been proclaimed to date, without violence of any sort, without any murder, robbery or rape, everyone being left completely at liberty. The sole intention of the people was to disarm those who might have been obstacles to the consolidation of a successful revolution. Thus did the peasants of Casas Viejas behave. Despite their lack of learning and the hunger gnawing in their bellies… (Not that this was to prevent some dolt of a señorito in Medina some days later to speak of some fantastic sharing out of the women that the revolutionaries apparently intended.) [157]

Eduardo de Guzmán’s account of the subsequent cold-blooded slaughter of the peasants of Casas Viejas caused a sensation that cracked the foundations of the Azaña government. At dawn, when Seisdedos’s shack had been razed to the ground and the bodies of the old man, his six children and grandson consumed by fire, Republican troops had swept through the town arresting everyone they could lay their hands on. The prisoners were then marched to the smoldering embers where the Seisdedos family had died where the officer in charge, Captain Rojas, ordered them shot in cold blood. The final death toll was 22 prisoners dead, three guards killed and perhaps four wounded. President Azaña, the alleged author of the order ‘No wounded, no prisoners; shoot them in the guts’, dismissed the allegations of cold-blooded murder by the Republican troops as a ‘fairy tale’. [158]

In an article in La Voz Confederal, an underground CNT paper, Durruti gave his assessment of the reasons for the failure of the January insurrection:

‘Certainly conditions were not ripe. If they had been we would not be in prison! But it is equally certain that we are living in a pre-revolutionary period and that we cannot permit the bourgeoisie to dominate it by strengthening the power of the state. In the same manner, we must prevent the state from strengthening itself by taking over the unions, which is the political ambition of the socialists and of some of our former comrades.

‘It is with this perspective that we must interpret the revolutionary attempt of 8 January. We never believed that the revolution consisted of the seizure of power by a minority that would impose a dictatorship on the people. Our revolutionary conscience is opposed to this tactic. We want a revolution by and for the people. Without this idea no revolution is possible. It would be a coup d’état, nothing more. And we, from the factories, the mines and the countryside, are seeking to develop an effective social revolution. There is nothing in this of Blanquism or Trotskyism, but the clear and precise idea that the revolution is something that we must work for every day. With this unknown quantity one can never be certain when it will break out.’[159]

Faced with the absolute disaster, the National and Regional Committees of the CNT refused to accept official responsibility for the ill-fated January rising. [160] While comrades were still fighting in the streets and villages of Levante and Andalucia the Madrid paper, CNT was busy denying all responsibility for the events then taking place. Its headline of 9 January affirmed ‘This is not our revolution. Is it a trap being prepared for us?’

The following day Solidaridad Obrera stated its somewhat equivocal position:

‘We cannot condemn the movement of Sunday. On the other hand, we cannot accept it as an act of the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo, because the organization was not aware of events.’

In spite of the fact that the rising had been planned and coordinated throughout by the National Defense Committee of the CNT and triggered by the Catalan Defense Committee, with the FAI playing no organizational role whatsoever, the Peninsular Committee of the FAI suddenly stepped in to claim full responsibility. It was undoubtedly a propagandist gesture aimed at deflecting the inevitable government repression from the open union organization. It was, however, no more than a gesture; since the FAI was an unregistered, therefore illegal, ad hoc association with no hierarchical chain of command or responsibility before the law, there was little likelihood or possibility even of the authorities acting on this statement.

In a statement of 11 February 1933, entitled La FAI al Pueblo, the Peninsular Committee of the FAI declared:

‘We say loud and clear, we affirm it absolutely, that we take full responsibility for all that occurred on the eighth and on the following as a violent protest against arbitrary acts. We are sick and tired of so much governmental crime. It is natural that we should appeal to methods that will make us heard, and reasonable that we should not cease until the insults, the sarcasm, the jeers, and the violent acts against anguished and hungry people are ended.

‘We want all the responsibility for ourselves, since we have not asked for the collaboration of anyone or the support of the working people, or even the CNT; and we did not advise our best friends of what we intended to carry out; and we will continue this course in the future, in order to be the only ones with the responsibility that derives from an attitude of straightforward rebellion and protest.

‘We know the tactics of the enemy from experience, and for that reason we have preferred not to call on the organized workers to second and maintain the protest. We are ourselves strong enough to act on our own, assuming all responsibility.

‘The social revolution will take place soon. We have the sympathy of the revolutionary people and the indestructible weapon of reason. Let government oppressors and their accomplices tremble. Forward comrades! Everyone at his post, and wait for the moment. On the black-and-red banner we have written the words ‘Love and Justice’. We are invincible. Long live the free workers of the town and country. Long live Libertarian Communism! Long live the Federación Anarquista Ibérica!’ [161]

José Peirats’s view of the revolutionary movements of 1932 and 1933 was more critical:

‘From a strategic point of view they were catastrophic. There was no plan, or it was deficient. We lacked the means for serious fighting and we limited ourselves to attacking in the populated areas. When we lost these there were no plans for a rural guerrilla campaign. With the exception of Andalucia we lacked a true peasant organization. We had made enemies of the petite bourgeoisie whom we had terrified with the lack of psychology in our propaganda. Furthermore, many of those who fought for Libertarian Communism did not believe it could be implemented by a simple audacious coup in cold blood and at a given time. Many of us took to the streets out of self love, not from conviction.’[162]

As to FAI involvement in the risings, Peirats, Secretary of the Barcelona Local Federation of Anarchist Groups at the time, recalls that following the January 1933 rising his Federation asked the Nosotros group to attend a clandestine meeting on Mount Horta to explain their conduct. ‘García Oliver, Aurelio Fernández and I can’t remember who else attended the meeting. They claimed that although they did not belong to the organization they had decided to come along out of deference, nothing else.’ He added: ‘In my capacity as secretary general of the Barcelona groups until the middle of 1934 I am in a position to assure you that neither Durruti nor García Oliver belonged to the specific organization.’[163]

The gratuitous violence of the repression which followed the January 1933 rising fueled a massive anti-governmental propaganda campaign which politicians of both left and right exploited to the full. With the government forced into assuming increasingly defensive postures against the combined pressure of the agrarian and industrial power elites, the credibility of the Socialist Party as a party of government and the parliamentary representative of the organized working class slipped even further.