18: December 1933 — Millenarians or ‘Conscious Militants’?

As expected, the right won the elections. With an abstention rate of 32 per cent in Spain as a whole and 40 per cent in Catalonia, [169] the authoritarian left, with an estimated loss of one and a half million votes, was roundly defeated. The socialists took just 60 seats against 116 in 1931. With the right victorious it was now the turn of the socialists to be on the receiving end of some of the repression they had been party to as members of the previous administration. On 3 December the Minister of the Interior declared a state of emergency. For the anarchists the bienio negro, the ‘Black Biennium’ as the repressive period that was to follow was dubbed, was merely a continuation of the repression that had begun in the summer of 1931.

The ‘victorious’ abstentionism of the CNT in the November 1933 elections should not be viewed as a mere passive and empty gesture. For the anarchists it was a necessary precondition for the insurrection that was to follow. Having committed themselves to social revolution as the only means of cutting the Gordian knot of liberal democracy, the activists of the CNT and FAI had no intention of reneging on that promise. Within days of the rightist parliamentary victory the National Defense Commission of the CNT appointed a revolutionary committee to plan and coordinate the uprising. Its members were Joaquín Ascaso, Durruti (according to Oliver he joined the committee against the views of the rest of the Nosotros group), Cipriano Mera, García Chacon, Casado Ojeda, Moisés and Jesús Alcrudo, Antonio Ejarque, Felipe Orquín, Ramón Andres and Dr Isaac Puente, the author of Libertarian Communism. Zaragoza was chosen as the base of the National Defense Committee because of its proximity to the CNT National Committee. The date of the rising was fixed for 8 December 1933, the day scheduled for the official opening of the rightist-dominated Cortes.

The uprising was presaged by a spectacular mass escape of 58 CNT prisoners from Barcelona’s Modelo prison. General strikes were declared in Zaragoza, Barcelona, Huesca, Valencia, Seville, Córdoba, Granada, Badajoz, Gijón and Logroño. Libertarian Communism was declared in a number of towns and villages, particularly among the vine-growing villages that dotted the banks of the river Ebro in Aragón and Rioja. Interestingly enough the majority of the anarchist militants who took part in the rising in the Ebro villages were smallholders, plowmen, sharecroppers and small tenant farmers, a fact that lends weight to the theory that these men and women were moved by revolutionary rather than purely economic motives. [169] Significantly, the uprising drew little support in Catalonia, Levante and Andalucia, regions which had borne the brunt of the repression following the earlier January rising and whose most reliable and committed militants were in jail.

In the socialist-dominated areas such as the Asturias and Bilbao the strikes were partial and sporadic. The failure of the socialists to respond favorably, the apathy of the broad mass of people and the demoralizing intervention by the conscript army meant the rising was doomed from the start. In Barcelona, where most of the leaders had been arrested even before the rising had been launched, fighting was limited to a short exchange of gunfire in a few working-class areas. It was, as indicated above, mainly in Rioja, Aragón and Navarre that the rising proved successful. In Zaragoza, for example, the revolutionaries managed to hold out for seven days before the police and the army managed to recapture the city. The eventual toll when the struggle finally collapsed on 15 December, as estimated by José Peirats, was 87 dead, countless wounded and 700 who received long prison sentences.

Writing from his prison cell, Dr Isaac Puente, one of the organizers of the rising, reflected on the various factors that contributed to the failure of the insurrection:

‘The episode took place during a freeze, against a background of inclement weather which marshaled all the rigors of cold, rain and snow against the undertaking. The Confederation’s entire anarchist leaven, its vital and active element, deployed to unleash this revolutionary act, in order to galvanize into action the timorous, passive element of the CNT which mobilized only in some villages. The people, broken by an inheritance of fear and conformist education, did not let themselves be caught up in the revolutionary zeal that moved the “heralds” whose impatience and faith speak of society’s urge for renewal. Owing to a variety of adverse circumstances, backing which had been counted on failed to materialize and, as a logical consequence of this the revolt was unable to spread beyond the scale it had attained on day one.’ [171]

The secretariat of the international anarcho-syndicalist organization, the IWMA (AIT), delivered their judgment with ‘perfect hindsight:

‘Passive abstentionism in countries where such abstentions may completely invalidate the elections, is a futile gesture unless it carries within it “dynamic seeds”. The “victorious” CNT abstentionism of November 1933 was really a “defeat” for the CNT because of its failed insurrection of December that same year. If that insurrection missed its mark in certain respects, it was because the CNT, during its phase of abstentionism which was, on the surface, successful…and probably before then, too…failed to concern itself with the immediate follow-up to that victory. Thus the futility of passive abstentionism was merely exacerbated by the pointless victory, for lack of preparation of events that ought to have invested it with a certain actuality. In France, where the aware abstentionism of the revolutionary masses can have no influence beyond propagation of our ideas, and no impact upon the outcome of the general elections, “passive” abstentionism today is inconsequential. It serves only as a declaration of principles that, sooner of later, will have to be implemented on bases researched and prepared in advance.

‘In Spain, that groundwork ought to have been in place. Every suitable opportunity ought to be seized for the purpose of steering our struggles along the lines of “revolutionary direct action”. In the struggle against fascism and the State, a general expropriatory strike can and should be the overture to such action. A successful abstentionism which leaves the State and its apparatus in a delicate position — and such was the case in November 1933 — can and should also be the overture to such action, unless one wishes to squander the dynamic effect of a passive success... ‘[172]