17: The Road to 1936

As the world crisis bit deeper into the economy, with unemployment affecting almost every working-class family, Spanish workers became increasingly more radicalized. Industrial Barcelona was particularly affected. The number of armed robberies and petty thefts in the city escalated. In response to this crime wave, which was laid at the door of the anarchists by the bourgeois press, the FAI launched a propaganda campaign to convince the workers that individual solutions were not the answer to their problems. Collective action and the revolutionary general strike were emphasized as the only enduring solutions to exploitation and injustice. Coming from such legendary ‘expropriators’ as Durruti, Ascaso, Oliver, etc., all of whom had abandoned their underground lives and were now respected and dedicated union and community activists, there could be no confusion in the thinking public’s mind that ‘banditry’ had anything to do with the revolutionary practices of anarchism.

Within the Cortes, the political climate was equally tense. The heart of the problem lay in the inherent contradictions and irreconcilable differences between the two contending power blocs. The extremists of the right, the old agrarian-based elites, were represented by the Partido Agrario, the party of the Castilian landowners led by the pro-monarchist Martínez de Velasco, and the Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas (CEDA), the Catholic party led by the Salamanca lawyer José María Gil Robles. These two parties, between them, represented the landed oligarchs and theocrats who had controlled Spain for centuries and who continued to maintain a tight grip on the economic and social life of the country under the Republic.

Opposing them were the extremists of the center, the agrarian, commercial and industrial bourgeoisie who gravitated towards Alejandro Lerroux’s Partido Republicano Radical. Both sides saw the struggle for political power in zero-sum terms. The legislative gains of one side meant possibly irreversible material damage to the class interests of the other. The right, for example, saw liberal agrarian reform, the eight-hour day and curbs on the power of the Church as being as much of a threat to the foundations of their society — property, privilege, religion and tradition — as social revolution. They responded to it with all the powerful resources at their disposal as a crusade to reassert the ‘traditional’ values of pre-Republican Spain. The forces of the ancien régime aimed to maneuver the socialists and the ascending bourgeois liberal democrats out of government and to clear the few tentative reforms that they had been able to introduce from the statute book, particularly the irksome law on municipal boundaries.

Durruti and Ascaso, ‘the terrible faístas’ who had been in hiding since the January uprising, were finally arrested in April 1933. That same month Ángel Pestaña formally announced the formation of his Syndicalist Party. Dr José Dencàs, the Councilor for Public Order in the Catalan government, the Generalitat, and his police chief, Miguel Badia, issued a joint statement announcing that the FAI was now ‘completely in shambles’.

From the early summer of 1933 the political pendulum in Spain began to swing to the right. Fascist and rightist provocations increased in direct proportion to the threat to the property, position and privileges of the landed oligarchy. An assault by young fascist Jonsistas (Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional Sindicalista) on the offices of the Friends of the Soviet Union was blamed on the anarchists. The government seized on this as a convenient pretext to round up a number of anarchists.

A governmental crisis in September 1933 had brought Alejandro Lerroux to power. His Cabinet consisted of radicals, left republicans and radical socialists, but no members of the PSOE. Not only had the socialists been squeezed out of government; the socialist UGT were losing an increasing number of members to the CNT. Largo Caballero’s Socialist Party response to the wave of organized working militancy was to adopt not only the rhetoric but also the apparent tactics of revolution.

The socialists, too, had come to realize that there was nothing more to be gained by collaborating with a hesitant and weak Republican bourgeoisie who, afraid of the masses, were too frightened to challenge the economic power base of the still powerful landed elite. Early in October, the socialist leader Indalecio Prieto declared to the Cortes that the socialists renounced all further compromise with the Republicans and affirmed there was to be no further collaboration between them and future Republican governments of any persuasion.

Lerroux’s premiership was short-lived. Diego Martínez Barrio, the interim premier, dissolved the Cortes. New elections were announced for November.

By the end of 1933 the Republic had lost all legitimacy in the eyes of both the workers and the agrarian, commercial, clerical and military elite. Historian Victor Alba wrote:

‘The 18 months of the Republican administration, the provocations of the right and the dithering of the left led to the deaths of 400 persons, of whom 20 belonged to the forces of law and order — 3,000 persons were recorded as wounded, 9,000 arrests were made, 160 persons were deported; there were 30 general strikes and 3,600 partial stoppages; 161 newspapers were suspended, of which four belonged to the right.’[164]

It was in this charged atmosphere that the FAI met in the National Plenum in Madrid in October 1933. Present were 21 delegates representing 569 groups and 4,839 members. In its report to the National Plenum, the Peninsular Committee admitted that the FAI had borne the responsibility for the uprising the previous January simply to spare the CNT the brunt of the repression.

In spite of the fact that an estimated 9,000 anarchist and CNT activists were in prison at this time, the FAI had registered a growth in membership. However, even at this, its pre-1937 peak, with an estimated 5,500 affiliates, the FAI still represented a relatively small section of the Spanish anarchist movement. [165]

The Plenum agreed that the CNT should continue to be influenced along anarchist lines and to retain the trabazón. It also agreed to step up the pressure on the deteriorating capitalist economy and to recommend abstention in the forthcoming elections. Other resolutions included greater anti-militarist activity, building up the anarchist press, and moving the Peninsular Committee to Zaragoza.

Perhaps the most important resolution agreed at the FAI Plenum was the decision to oppose further support for the brutal bourgeois Republic through the ballot box and, instead, issue a call for social revolution. Item No. 5 on the Agenda read:

‘… [Thus] this working party’s understanding is that we must direct our action to undermining the foundations of the capitalist economy by hindering its development in all its manifestations and by precipitating its ruination…

‘The anarchist groups of the FAI will devote their best efforts to contriving the decomposition of capitalism and thus to an ongoing revolutionary backlash against any fascist venture by the political parties, without distinction. The groups shall be on a war footing for the struggle against native and international fascism, hatched by the mad determination of the parties to match the ultimate requirements of capitalism. Any possible unleashing of the reaction must be met with by our people’s committing themselves to the social revolution.’

Catalonia added to the resolution that:

‘We cannot remain silent in the face of the present threat. As an ideological principle we should recommend abstention. In the event of a possible reactionary victory, we should hurl ourselves into revolution without delay.’[166]

The local CNT Federation of Barcelona supported the faista position wholeheartedly. The following statement appeared in Solidaridad Obrera at the end of October:

‘If, as a result of our anti-electoral campaign… the reaction attempts to establish itself in power in Spain, the revolutionary workers of the CNT will have sufficient grace, courage and honor to place themselves in the forefront of the struggle and destroy the reaction, employing all the violent means and arms necessary.’[167]

The previous day at a National Plenum of CNT Regionals in Madrid, it was unanimously agreed that the organization would be put on a war footing in the event of a rightist victory in the elections.

In keeping with the anti-electoral decisions of the FAI National Plenum and the CNT Plenum of Regionals’ decisions, clearly influenced by the relentless and vicious anti-anarchist mentality and policies of the party-political left, the anarchists embarked on a massive anti-voting campaign in the run up to the elections of 19 November 1933.

‘Don’t Vote!’ urged the slogans and posters that covered the walls of all major cities, ‘because that banal act spells the ritualization of your slavery.’

Similar watchwords were repeated at public meetings and in the pages of the anarchist press up and down the country.

The decision not to vote was not merely a declaration of war on the leadership of a hidebound Socialist Party and the bourgeois republicans who, during 30 months in power, had relentlessly attempted to limit and roll back the hopes and aspirations of the dispossessed people of Spain.

The anarchists saw their duties as revolutionaries as being to analyze and advise the workers as to the possible consequences of their voting. Tied to a strategy of social revolution, the anti-voting campaign was not just a self-indulgent exercise in abstract principles — it became a constructive act of affirmation in the future and a revolutionary statement of intent.

The campaign culminated on 16 November with a mass meeting at the Palace of Fine Arts in Barcelona. Speakers from both the FAI and the CNT, including Domingo Germinal, Valerio Oroban Fernández, secretary of the Asociación Internacional de Trabajadores (AIT) and one of the few CNT leaders who did not belong to the FAI, and Buenaventura Durruti, addressed a packed auditorium. The slogan was ‘Social revolution not the ballot box’.

Durruti wound up the meeting by saying:

‘Workers, the storms are approaching. To prepare for all emergencies, the FAI advises the workers of the CNT, since it is they who control the factories and the production sites, not to abandon them. They should stay close to the machines. Let us start to set up workers’ councils and use the techniques that should be basic to the new social and libertarian economy.

‘The anarchists, as always, will do their duty by being the first to throw themselves into the struggle. The occupation of the factories in Italy should be a lesson to us. They should spread constantly outwards, for, like all insurrections, they must be on the offensive. To be on the defensive always means death to any uprising, so the seizure of the factories without cooperation from outside means death through isolation. The workers have nothing more to lose than their chains. Long live the social revolution.’[168]