19: The Planners Move In

By early 1934, with most of the revolutionary anarchists in jail or in hiding, the changes which had begun to take place in the FAI since the previous year became more noticeable, both structurally and in membership. From being the ‘cutting edge’ of the CNT rank and file it became the seedbed for a new breed of bohemian intellectuals, administrators and publicists. There was a clear shift towards centralization and greater emphasis on turning the FAI into an organizational ‘center of excellence’ that would ‘sharpen the weapons of revolution’. [173] Santillán, one of those maverick intellectuals, who had joined the FAI in mid 1933 on his return from Argentina, was the principal architect of this shift away from what he described as ‘resistance to capitalism’ and towards ‘revolutionary preparation’:

‘The emphasis now should be on attack rather than defense and that attack implies a better disposition of our forces, for in the economic sphere output and consumption cannot be interrupted, lest the revolution itself makes itself odious and be forced to reply solely upon new dictatorships. The more thoroughly it has been prepared, and the greater the measure of planning for the seizure and running of the means of production, distribution and consumption by the producers themselves, the more libertarian and the less bloody will the revolution be.’[174]

Santillán was a man convinced of his own rightness, as were the people he attracted around him in the Nervio group. From an earlier career as a globetrotting journalist and union administrator he had developed an obsession with the need for economic planning and for formulating a ‘scientific’ approach to anarchism. In the early twentieth century there were two main schools of thought within anarchism, the scientific-rational approach to the search for objective truths, the view upheld by intellectuals such as Santillán, and the scientific-naturalist method preferred by anarchists such as Isaac Puente, Ascaso and Durruti.

Conscious that absolute truth did not exist, the members of this latter group were cautious of all predetermined systems and of imposing solutions of a pre-established nature that might carry within them the seeds of a new dictatorship. The anarchist writer Ricardo Mella had highlighted the dangers of such systems in an essay written at the turn of the century:

‘It is science’s business to systemize; and by systemizing we wall ourselves up in science, become dogmatic. Behold, the cause behind every fenced enclosure; and see, the reason behind the failure of beliefs…

‘Instead, whenever a new structure is being raised and new channels opened and new walls being built, work with your picks and leave not a stone upon a stone. Thought needs unlimited space, endless time and freedom without restriction. There can be no rounded theories, no completed systems, and no single philosophies because there is no absolute immutable truth: there are truths and yet more truths, truths undiscovered and truths yet unlearned.’[175]

Santillán, however, was not content to lay down axioms and general principles as Isaac Puente had done. Obsessed with efficiency, he sought to draw up a system which was complete in all its parts and required only to be set in motion:

‘There is an urgent need for workers to work together in harmony with the greatest possible number of scientists and technicians: for only through science, expertize and hard work will we be able to realize on earth the paradise of which religions of the old school dream beyond the tomb… Whereas, for resistance to capitalism, the waged worker was the basic and sole factor, when it comes to the reconstruction of society and of the economy, then given the development achieved by the means of production and by culture, all progressive forces are required, especially the aforementioned trilogy of labor, science and technology.’[176]

Through the work of these anarchist intellectuals, ‘the brightest and the best’, Abad de Santillán saw the FAI providing Spanish anarchism with the organizational and ideological discipline he felt it lacked to fulfill its historic role of transforming society. He described the work of the new Peninsular Committee with self-effacing modesty:

‘We did not take our lead from the higher committees, but rather from below, through educational activity and constructive propaganda. I was on good terms with the hitherto crucial group that consisted of Ascaso, Durruti, García Oliver and Companys. These were splendid comrades, selfless, schooled in conspiratorial struggle and in the action that was then necessary. Little by little we began to focus attention upon more substantial activities and the FAI rallied the best equipped, most learned, most responsible militants. The dissidents took a back seat: we published magazines, books and pamphlets and held local, regional and national meetings with a certain quality of agenda. There was a lot of personal dialogue and it was precisely in the men of Los Solidarios that I found my best support. The FAI did not embody systematic subversion: it was a movement loyal to doctrine: in those days the aficionados of heroic, epic action took refuge in the defense committees. And we cannot deny that defense was needed.

‘Today, as yesterday, we have had hotheads, revolutionaries in a hurry. But the FAI ceased to be an exponent of such hotheadedness at least from early 1934 on…Not all good comrades were in the FAI, many were outside it, but morally they were a part of it and the proof is that Tierra y Libertad had a larger print run than most of the political weeklies put together.’[177]

It was not long before this new mandarin breed in the administrative organs of the FAI felt strong enough to move against the ‘disproportionate’ influence of the spontaneist and ‘uncontrollable’ elements within the movement, particularly the Los Solidarios/Nosotros and other revolutionary working-class groups. The offensive against the activists within the Barcelona Local Federation of the FAI was led by the A group who argued the need for greater democratic ‘control’ within the organization. Precisely who was to administer this ‘control’ remained unclear. The question of the right of minorities not only to dissent but also to propose organizational changes was also raised. Moves were made to expel the Nosotros group, but nothing came of it and they continued to exert a powerful influence within the FAI and CNT until the outbreak of the Civil War. [178]

Progreso Fernández was one of those sensitive to the shift in direction that had resulted from the influx of newcomers. For him the FAI now ceased to be the anarchist association he had joined in 1927:

‘I dropped out of the FAI in 1934 when I returned from exile; its authoritarian tendencies were already evident. Lots of people dropped away then — but we remained anarchists, because anarchism is an attitude to life.’[179]

José Peirats, at the time a member of the Afinidad group and secretary of the Barcelona Local Federation of the FAI, later recalled: [180]

‘You mention the proposal to expel Los Solidarios and you speak of my advocacy of the minorities’ rights issue. I cannot recall this business of expelling Los Solidarios, but I very well recall the exact reason why I quit the FAI, whose local secretary I had been, in the summer of 1934 (it might have been in July).

My two colleagues on the secretariat were Magrina (Eusebio) and Cabrerizo. The latter perished in the Plaza de Catalunya during the siege laid to the rebel troops dug in the Hotel Colón and in the Telefónica building. The exact reason was that some groups advocated the introduction into the FAI of what they termed discipline: voting and observance of the law of majorities. We took the line that in the FAI, an anarchist affinity organization, the implementation of such procedures was a negation of the precept of liberty and thus of anarchism’s purest essences. We lost the battle and we withdrew. I handed the seal over to Idelfonso Gonzales of the Nervio group who became the new secretary.

‘So that you may understand this matter properly, let me add that the FAI was then (in 1934) little short of deserted. No more than six groups of us would come together in Las Planas or in the hills of Horta. During my term as Local Secretary — a period of exactly one year — we did not lay eyes on Los Solidarios (in the flesh) more than once. We summoned them, García Oliver and others, because they had traveled to Madrid for talks with Lerroux. Their answer was that they had acceded to the summons out of courtesy, but did not feel under any obligation to give us an account of their activities. This would have been well into the spring of 1933.

‘What I am trying to get over is that the members of that group, whom we never saw at our meetings, were active more in the Defense Groups than in the FAI, although on the dais and in the press they always specifically professed to be of the FAI. To support this argument let me tell you that in the immediate wake of the events of 8 January 1933, we of the Afinidad group called upon Durruti to give an account of himself before the Local Federation of (FAI) Groups. To our astonishment, we were told in reply that none of the leaders of that uprising belonged to the FAI.

‘It was in the summer of 1934 that the FAI saw a greater influx of people. There is an explanation for this. I don’t know whether you will recall that around that time there was an appeal for every leading CNT militant to join the FAI. Then there was a massive influx, but also lots of arguments, for the motley crew of newcomers were very full of themselves. It was then that I saw Muñoz, Marianet, de Santillán, Toryho and possibly also your Z group[181] in the Local. It is possible that the fact that there was allegedly another Los Solidarios group in the Barcelona Local Federation was due to the fact that the authentic owners of the title were not, as I say, under its control. The changing of their name to Nosotros may possibly have been as a result of their reentry at the time of the 1934 influx and their inability to force the others to change theirs.’

During the summer of 1934 Largo Caballero, through intermediaries, made overtures to the CNT of Catalonia concerning a possible revolutionary alliance with the socialist UGT. Significantly, the approach was made not to the National Committee of the CNT in Zaragoza but to the Regional Committee of Catalonia. A meeting was arranged between Rafael Vidiella and Vila Cuenca, chairmen of the UGT and PSOE in Catalonia respectively, apparently on behalf of the national leadership, and Francisco Ascaso, the then secretary of the CNT Regional Committee of Catalonia. Ascaso was accompanied at the initial meeting by Buenaventura Durruti and García Oliver — all three of them members of the Confederal Defense Committee for Catalonia.

According to García Oliver, [182] Vidiella and Cuenca proposed to the Catalan anarchists — effectively the Nosotros group — a joint UGT–CNT–Esquerra rising, which would be ‘federalist and socialist’ in inspiration. The objective was to bring down the right-wing government. Ascaso explained that any agreement would have to be formalized at a joint meeting with Largo Caballero. A meeting was arranged for the next time the socialist leader was in Barcelona. The meeting never took place. Companys refused point blank to have anything to do with ‘those CNT–FAI types’. To do so, he claimed, would be seen by the world as unmistakable evidence of the weakness of the ‘Popular Front’. Companys assured Caballero that with the support of the escamots, his private army of young nationalists, his reputation alone was sufficient to rally the whole population of Catalonia behind them.

On 4 October 1934, Alejandro Lerroux patched together a new, predominantly right wing government. It was made up of radicals, agrarians, liberal democrats and three ministers from the CEDA, the party of the Catholic fundamentalists that had still to declare its support for the Republic. The news of this ministry, with the participation of Gil Robles, a man likened to the Austrian clerical-fascist leader Dolfuss, was the signal for the UGT–PSOE to embark on its gambit for power — revolt.

In the Asturias, the Regional Committee of the CNT, a minority union with a membership of only 22,000, had signed a local agreement with the dominant UGT — the Alianza Obrera (Workers’ Alliance). The Alianza was the creation of the Marxist Joaquín Maurín, one of the pro-Bolsheviks who had unsuccessfully attempted to infiltrate and take over the CNT in the 1920s. It was an amalgam of the opposition unions (sindicatos de oposición) set up following the treintista split, the socialists and communists. The Asturias was the only CNT region to sign the Alianza.

In spite of the fact that they had committed themselves to the Asturias rising and were provided with weapons, something that did not happen elsewhere, the CNT were not invited to participate in the Revolutionary Committee. Neither was the CNT National Committee ever approached by the socialist leaders of the rising. Miguel Yoldi, the CNT national secretary, had attempted, on his own initiative, to make contact with Largo Caballero and the Oviedo-based UGT–PSOE-dominated Revolutionary Committee to coordinate the actions of the two unions, but he had been rebuffed at every turn.

The revolt, organized by the socialists, with the CNT and the communist minority in an auxiliary role, began in the Asturian mining region at dawn on 5 October. The UGT declared a general strike against the entry of the Spanish Confederation of the Autonomous Right (CEDA) into the Spanish government on 6 October, which later developed into a revolutionary uprising. The UGT did not seek the support of the CNT, but in spite of this deliberate affront, confederal militants throughout Spain supported the stoppage out of moral solidarity. During initial successes by the Asturian workers, the miners occupied first Oviedo and then several other towns, most notably the large industrial center of La Felguera, setting up town assemblies or ‘revolutionary committees’ to govern localities they controlled, as steps towards a socialist republic. However, government troops surrounded the region and quickly closed in on the revolutionaries. The director of operations, General López Ochoa, a republican and freemason, and the new rising star in the military firmament General Francisco Franco Bahamonde, put down the rising with medieval brutality. Confronted with disaster, the PSOE–UGT-controlled central revolutionary committee finally ordered an ignominious retreat on 11 October.

In Catalonia it was the Estat Català and the Esquerra, the governing parties, who had been the prime movers in what they had hoped would be a palace coup. In a radio broadcast from the Generalitat palace Companys proclaimed an autonomous Catalan state within a federal Spanish Republic. He also offered the provisional federal government a base in Catalonia, but neither the ‘Popular Front’, the Alianza Obrera nor the Union de Rabassaires (the Catalan peasants’ party) responded to his appeals for support. The failure of the Generalitat to issue arms to the Alianza Obrera and the unprovoked attacks on and arrests of CNT and FAI militants by Badia’s police contributed heavily to the workers’ suspicions of the bourgeois Catalan nationalists. Immediately prior to the rising, Generalitat police raided the homes of all known anarchist militants. Durruti, for example, was arrested in his bed on 4 October and imprisoned for almost a year.

The anti-anarchist campaign waged by the socialists and the political left since the birth of the Republic had, however, materially weakened the CNT. Until April 1933, it was estimated, upwards of 15,000 CNT members were in jail. [183] The Generalitat’s policy of repressing the CNT, which for the previous year had been obliged to lead a clandestine existence, was intensified. Solidaridad Obrera, the Catalan CNT daily, had been shut down and the Generalitat police throughout 1934 had sealed all CNT locals, ateneos and cultural centers. According to Abad de Santillán, a sympathetic communist member of the Workers’ Alliance had informed them that Dencàs had issued orders to his men to fire on all CNT members spotted on the streets. When the Confederal militants attempted to reopen their closed-down union premises on the morning of the rising Badia’s police fired them on. It is ironic that the first shots to ring out in Barcelona were aimed against the CNT by those in revolt against the central government.

The editorial offices of Solidaridad Obrera were also attacked. However, in spite of this hostility, which verged on a state of war, the CNT declared a general strike in support of the rising.

Within a few hours of Companys’s declaration, General Batet Mestres, the captain general of Catalonia, proclaimed martial law. With 500 or so soldiers he had cleared the Generalitat and Catalanist forces from the streets. When Batet’s artillery fired unprimed cannon shells at the Generalitat building that they had made their headquarters the leaders surrendered. Ricardo Sanz quickly collected the weapons, including 300 Winchesters, dropped into the sewers by the fleeing Catalan nationalists, and CNT members of the council refuse department. These were to reemerge two years later on 19 July 1936. In Badalona and Granollers the abandoned weapons had permitted the CNT to gain control of the streets. The Catalan Regional Committee of the CNT, unaware of events then taking place in the Asturias, ordered a return to work after two days’ general strike.

The ambiguity with which the UGT–PSOE responded to what was their own rising, with the notable exception of the Asturias and, to a lesser extent, parts of León and Catalonia, suggests the real intention of the leadership may have been, by unleashing a limited conflict, to force the resignation of the right-wing CEDA government — or at least to allow them to negotiate their way back into the government.