20: Interregnum — 1934–1935

In the recriminations that followed October, the CNT’s alleged lack of solidarity was singled out by the Marxist press as a prime contributory factor to the ignominious collapse of the rising. From exile in Paris, the Socialist Party leader, Indalecio Prieto, claimed in a statement to the United Press Agency that one of the reasons for the failure of the rising — which they, the socialist leaders had not wanted, regarding it as premature and inadequately prepared — was the abstention of the CNT. Rafael Vidiella, the Catalan PSOE leader, who wrote in Leviatán, did not share this opinion: [184]

‘So what happened that on the morning of 7 October the Generalitat was to surrender without offering any resistance and without being defended — after a few brief hours…? Quite simply, what happened is that today’s revolutions cannot be made by halves. There are two forces present in the world: capitalism and the proletariat, and half-measures cannot satisfy either, because they make both discontented.

‘The Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya was a party without tradition in Catalan political life. In Catalonia there were only two, real, homogenous factors; the Lliga and the CNT, which is to say, the capitalist factor and the proletarian one. But the latter was and is the irreconcilable enemy of political contest, of the capture of local councils and Parliament. In 1931 the Spanish revolution had a safety valve in the form of the municipal elections. If it had been the CNT that ran candidates in Catalonia, they would have won. For one very simple and yet very potent reason: because no Catalan sector had been so sorely oppressed by the monarchy and the Lliga and no one had fought so bitterly and so strenuously against these since 1911 as had the CNT. In 1929 I had occasion to anticipate this possible triumph of the CNT, if the Spanish revolution culminated in a political contest: but the Confederation, by its inhibitions, ensured that in Catalonia and in some Spanish provinces the victory went to many lawyers and friends of these who defended the unionists whenever they were persecuted by the monarchy.

‘The proletariat were unarmed. Estat Català was afraid that it might be swept aside by the proletariat. On the other hand, and not unreasonably, the working class suspected that it would be gunned down by Estat Català that possessed over ten tons of arms. In addition, a deep chasm had opened up between the proletariat proper and the Generalitat. The arms in the hands of the Estat Català were useless. A well-known FAI militant, García Oliver, forecast this some months previously…and he was not mistaken.’

On 19 October the government announced that the Asturian uprising had been completely crushed. According to official figures issued in January 1935 by the Dirección General de Seguridad, 1,051 civilian and 284 military and security personnel had died in the rising. Whatever the reasons for the failure of the October rising, an important consequence was the realization within both legal and fascist rightist circles that in the event of future failure at the polls the military option was the only one that remained open to them. Clearly, the only way their policies could effectively be implemented and their long-term interests defended was by transforming the Republic into a corporate state along the lines of Mussolini’s Italy. Plans for a corporatist right-wing coup had, in fact, been initiated as early as March 1934 at a meeting in Rome between Mussolini and Air Marshal Italo Balbo, and representatives of the Carlists and Calvo Sotelo’s monarchist Renovación Española. Mussolini promised to provide the plotters with a substantial first installment of weapons, ammunition and money that would be followed by further, larger contributions when required.

In late 1935 Santillán’s Nervio group of Barcelona controlled the Peninsular Committee of the FAI. The Committee’s emphasis was now determinedly intellectual rather than activist: Pedro Herrera, Idelfonso González, Germinal de Sousa and Fidel Miró. Santillán was appointed secretary of the Peninsular Committee. One of the first tasks of the new Peninsular Committee was to revamp Tierra y Libertad and turn it into a theoretical and doctrinal journal. Jacinto Toryho, a journalist whose ideas and personality generated mixed feelings within the movement, was among those closely involved in running the FAI paper, as was the outgoing peninsular secretary, Juan Manuel Molina (‘Juanel’). In keeping with the theoretical and intellectual priorities of the new Committee, a publishing house specializing in anarchist economic and social theory was soon established.

Another objective of the new Peninsular Committee was to initiate new organizational changes. These changes were not welcomed by many of the groups, highlighting as they did the accelerating drift toward centralization and the weakening of the autonomy of the affinity groups. With the exception of Catalonia, the new-look Peninsular Committee had a delegate in each local federation of groups and another in each regional committee, giving it considerable oversight of the overall organizational position and, consequently, greater influence and control.