Chapter 21 : Plots, Plans and the Popular Front

21: Plots, Plans and the Popular Front

A series of economic and social crises and major scandals in late 1935 involving the bribery and corruption of government ministers finally brought down the right-wing government of Alejandro Lerroux. The Estraperlo Scandal, the one that attracted most publicity, involved the presentation of gold watches to members of the government and Radical Party in return for the licensing of ‘fixed’ electrical roulette wheels in casinos. New elections were arranged for February 1936. The electoral campaign of the right, centered round Gil Robles, whom President Alcalá Zamora disliked and had been avoiding appointing as prime minister, was aimed at establishing a totalitarian regime.

The left, on the other hand, unwilling to go into the elections disunited, formed a ‘Popular Front’ coalition consisting of socialists, republicans, communists and other Marxist groupings, as well as the Catalan and other bourgeois nationalist groups. Its program, the work of Azaña and Prieto, was a moderate one, promising full restoration of the constitution, reform of taxation, police, etc., but it repudiated the socialist program for the nationalization of the land, the banks and industry. It also offered an amnesty for all political crimes committed after November 1933. This was to be the carrot for the CNT.

Companys, in the meantime, had smuggled a letter from prison to his deputy, José Antonio Trabal Sanz, suggesting an approach be made to the Catalan CNT to ask them to halt their anti-election propaganda in the run-up to the forthcoming elections.

Two men approached García Vivancos, a freemason and a trusted associate of the Nosotros group Farreras, Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Catalonia and the Balearics, and Salvat on behalf of the Esquerra. A meeting was arranged with Ascaso, Durruti and Oliver to discuss Companys’s proposals that the CNT refrain from an active anti-election campaign.

Before informing the Regional Committee of the CNT about this approach, García Oliver convened a meeting of the like-minded comrades in the Nosotros group and the Confederal Defense Committee of Catalonia (the two so overlapped as to be almost indistinguishable) to discuss the Esquerra proposals. In Oliver’s view, if they ducked out of the meeting with Companys’s envoys they would seek a similar accommodation with other CNT militants, either in Catalonia or Madrid. A decision had to be made quickly.

The crucial meeting was held in Oliver’s apartment, opposite the Jupiter football ground in Barcelona’s Pueblo Nuevo district. All the Nosotros group attended — Jover, Aurelio Fernández, Ricardo Sanz, Durruti, including new members Antonio Ortíz and Antonio Martínez. Also present was García Vivancos. Apart from the one or two militants who held positions of influence in the union — Jover was a member of the CNT Regional Committee and Aurelio Fernández belonged to the Local Committee of Barcelona’s CNT Unions — the anarchists assembled that day also constituted the influential Confederal Defense Committee of Catalonia, the joint CNT–FAI body entrusted with coordinating the defense and revolutionary strategy of the organization.

When Vivancos had outlined the proposals put to him by the Esquerra and Grand Lodge, García Oliver gave his view of the situation. If the CNT helped put the ‘Popular Front’ in it would provide them with the means to attack them. If, on the other hand, the CNT abstained, the reactionaries would get in and attack both them and the reformists together, morally the same as voting them in, something which no anarchist could ever do, even though the reformists would probably try to sell them out to the reactionaries as a bargaining lever. The only viable option the anarchists were left with was to support a tactical vote for the ‘Popular Front’ as a means of keeping the fascists out long enough to allow them to prepare for what they foresaw as an inevitable violent confrontation with the military. Oliver proposed that in return for supporting the ‘Popular Front’ at the polls the CNT should be provided with sufficient weapons to resist the military uprising.

Nothing, however, was to be agreed until they had secured the promise of weapons in advance of, or immediately after, the electoral victory of the left.

The Catalan anarchists agreed that when the issue of the anti-election campaign came up for discussion in the run-up to the elections, their duty as revolutionaries was to spell out what they saw as the likely consequences of voting or abstentionism:

‘If the working class abstains from voting this time, election victory will go to the fascist right. Should they succeed, we would have to take to the streets to fight them with all available weaponry.

‘Should the working class vote this time, and vote for the left, the right, backed by the military, will revolt before six months are up, and we would have to take to the streets to fight them with weapons.

‘So we do not say to you that you should NOT vote. But nor do we tell you that you should vote. Let each individual act as his conscience dictates. But you should all be ready for fighting in the streets, no matter whether it is the right who win, or the left.’[185]

Two days later García Vivancos set up the meeting between Companys’s envoys Trabal, Farreras and Salvat, and the anarchists Ascaso, Durruti and Oliver. A letter from Companys was read out in which the Catalan nationalist declared his admiration for the men of the CNT and his apologies for what had happened in October 1934. The problems that united them now, he pointed out, included the thousands of political prisoners throughout Spain. If the right, under Gil Robles and his CEDA associates won the elections the political prisoners would remain in jail for many years. If, on the other hand, the CNT was prepared to suspend its anti-election propaganda and encourage the Spanish and Catalan workers to vote for the ‘Popular Front’, the left would win and secure the release of those prisoners. Ascaso, Durruti and Oliver were, therefore urged to use their influence with their comrades to shift their anti-electoral position.

Oliver put the Defense Committee case, pointing out that the union, although it had lots of men at its disposal, lacked the weapons necessary for the inevitable confrontation with the army if the left won the elections. The CNT could only face that risk if sufficient weapons were deposited in the anarchist strongholds of Aragón, Andalucia and the Levante, the ‘anarchist triangle’, either immediately or, at the latest, within two months of a leftist electoral victory.

Companys’s reply came a fortnight later. He argued that a military rising was improbable and, therefore, the Defense Committee demands were excessive and unreasonable. The resources of a legitimate state would be sufficient to deter the right. The prospective Catalan premier did, however, promise to provide the anarchist revolutionaries with arms once victory at the polls had been assured. Having no option but to make do with this somewhat ambivalent assurance, Durruti, Ascaso and Oliver agreed to use what influence they had to prevent the Confederation and the FAI embarking on an anti-voting campaign in the run-up to the February 1936 elections.

Largo Caballero, the PSOE–UGT leader, like Lluís Companys and the Esquerra politicians, was equally sensitive to the electoral importance of the 1,600,000 CNT members. The successful anti-election campaign run by the anarchists in 1933 had had a disastrous effect on his own quest for power. Swallowing his hostility, he appealed to the CNT publicly to support the ‘Popular Front’ in the forthcoming elections.

The CNT’s Regional Committee in Catalonia responded quickly. It convened a Regional Conference on 26-–29 January 1936 to discuss the issue of supporting the ‘Popular Front’ candidates in the forthcoming elections. Another important item on the agenda was the question of a formal revolutionary alliance with the UGT. The discussion revealed a high degree of confusion and ideological uncertainty as to whether the anti-election stance was a tactical issue or a matter of fundamental principle. The fact that activists of such standing as Durruti, Ascaso and Oliver, as well as the Peninsular Committee of the FAI, were lobbying extensively within the movement in support of tactical voting lent considerable weight to that position. [186]

The secretariat of the anarcho-syndicalist international, the AIT, sent a letter to the Regional Conference warning against the dangers of even tactical participation in the capitalist and statist electoral process:

‘The forthcoming elections scheduled for February have produced the collective hallucination of an age of possible social achievement being ushered in thanks to a victory by the left. From moderate republicans through to the communists, the so-called Anti-Fascist Front promises to struggle against al the forces of reaction.

‘In various confederal bodies in Spain the issue is mooted — “Is it proper to vote? Should we vote or not? Ought the casting of our votes be deemed a function of our immutable principles, or should it be construed instead as a mere tactic that may alter as the needs of the moment alter? Is there a danger in abstaining in that it represents a boost to the right?” All these questions are not hotly debated in the bosom of our Spanish affiliate. Such indecisions, ‘correcting of sights’, must be attributed entirely to this collective psychosis which has its origins in the pending danger.

‘There are but two alternatives: either many Spanish comrades, persuaded that this time their abstentionist propaganda would not be as effective as it was back in 1933, choose to keep to it because it retains all its values as a declaration of principles: or that propaganda will once again lead to a parliamentary and governmental impasse in the country, in which case the CNT must now take the necessary steps to exploit the situation… by means of social revolution. For it is an open secret that there is only one way out of the struggle against fascism; that is, Revolution…’

Although the conference officially reaffirmed the anti-parliamentarian position of the CNT, the anti-voting campaign it organized in the run-up to the elections was half-hearted to say the least. CNT historian José Peirats described it as ‘so perfunctory as to be scarcely perceptible’. A minority of anarchists did abstain, but the vast bulk of the CNT members (of whom perhaps, at most, half a million might have described themselves as anarchists), particularly in Aragón where voting had been recommended, and in Catalonia, ignored the pastoral letter of the AIT and voted for progressive candidates. Thus did the CNT militants play as decisive a part in bringing the ‘Popular Front’ of 1936 to power as they had had in the birth of the Republic in 1931 and the rightist victory of 1933. [187] Whether they voted to hasten the revolution, were playing for time or were swayed by the ‘Popular Front’ bait of total amnesty for the 15,000 or so political and social prisoners (many of whom were anarchists and cenetistas imprisoned for their part in the insurrections of December 1933 and October 1934) is impossible to ascertain; what is certain is the confederal workers did not vote for the ‘Popular Front’ as a solution to their problems.

Immediately after the CNT conference, a FAI Peninsular Plenum was held in Madrid on 31 January and 1 February. The reports from the various regional federations and committees were discouraging. The number of groups affiliated to the FAI had dropped from the all-time high in 1933 to 469. This drop could be attributed partly to the repression of the previous two years, but is also reflected the growing unease felt among anarchists with the centralizing direction taken by the FAI Peninsular Committee under the influence of de Santillán’s Nervio group. [188]

Worried by the drop in number of affiliated groups, the FAI Plenum decided to mount a recruitment drive in an attempt to double the organization’s numbers. In two years the FAI had lost 2,000 individuals– from around 5,500 in 1933 to an estimated 3,500 in 1936. An appeal was issued for all anarchists to joint the organization. It also agreed to counter the ‘Popular Front’ alliances between the bourgeoisie and workers, to confront the rising fascist danger, and to increase the work of the anti-militarist groups in the barracks. [189]

One of the most important resolutions proposed was that of the Barcelona Local Federation on ‘revolutionary preparedness’ and the coordination of the revolutionary defense forces. It showed a clear awareness of the inevitability of the military coup and the prospects this opportunity held out for ‘engaging in ultimate battle with the aged edifice of capitalist morality, economics and politics.’ These ‘local revolutionary preparedness committees’ were to be appointed by the local committees and consist of four members, two from the Confederation and two from the FAI, each with specific tasks: Transport and Communications; Technical Preparation for Combat; Industrial Organization; and the Organizational Deployment of the Insurrectionary Forces.

Their function was to act as an anarchist general staff, a forward-planning committee that would prepare the local defense committees for the realities of modern combat, to ‘examine the means and methods of struggle, the tactics to be deployed and the organization of insurrectionary organizational forces.’[190] Both the unions and the anarchist groups were to finance the work of the local preparedness committees.

The Aragón, Rioja and Navarre delegates opposed the proposed revolutionary preparedness committees on the grounds that that was a task best left to the Defense Committees. In their view, the FAI should concentrate wholly on ideological propaganda. [191]

Other plans to cope with war or a military rising included a national sabotage plan, the relaunching of the anarchist paper for soldiers Soldado del Pueblo, and the setting up of intelligence gathering and revolutionary cadres inside the barracks.

On the question of the forthcoming elections, most FAI delegates reaffirmed their classical anti-parliamentary stance, but added that although the 1933 anti-election campaign was justified at the time it was not appropriate to repeat the exercise. The resolution that was finally approved was noticeably silent on the question of an anti-election campaign: ‘We reaffirm our anti-parliamentary and our anti-electoral position. World events, bearing out our predictions, have eloquently demonstrated that all democratic experiences have foundered and that only direct intervention by the workers, in the problems with which the capitalist system confronts them, has any offensive or defensive value against the reaction. The FAI, therefore, has nothing to amend in its complete abstention from all direct and indirect collaboration with any State politicking.’

Interestingly, towards the end of the Plenum, the delegate from the Levante referred to an article in Tierra y Libertad that had suggested that going to the polls was a tactical issue and not a matter of principle. The editorial board of the anarchist paper explained that it was trying to clarify what should be regarded as principle and what should be understood as tactical: ‘The revolution itself is a question of tactics, method, procedures. Principles, on the other hand, are the fundamental aims for which it strives: how these are to be achieved and encompassed is a matter of tactics.’[192]

The left were the undisputed victors in the elections. A ‘Popular Front’ government of 263 leftist deputies led by Manuel Azaña took office. The center, with 52 deputies, and the right, with 129, were powerless against such an overwhelming majority. The train of events that was to lead inexorably to a military uprising was gathering momentum.

Two days before the election the National Committee of the CNT issued a statement to its members as to what it saw as the inevitable consequences of a leftist victory in the elections. It was also a clear declaration of intent to the Republican bourgeoisie as well as to the military plotters and the landed oligarchs whose interests they serve that the most powerful labor union in Spain would respond to a military revolt with the ultimate expression of working-class power — social revolution:

‘On a war footing, proletariat, against the monarchist and fascist conspiracy! Day by day the suspicion is growing that rightist elements are ready to provoke intervention by the military… Insurrection has been deferred, pending the outcome of the elections. They are to implement their theoretical scheme of prevention should victory at the polls go to the left. Furthermore, we have no hesitation in recommending that, wheresoever the legionnaires of tyranny may launch armed insurrection, an understanding be unhesitatingly reached with anti-fascist groups, vigorous precautions being taken to ensure that the defensive contribution of the masses may lead to real social revolution under the auspices of Libertarian Communism. Should the conspirators open fire, the act of opposition must be pursued to its utmost consequences without the liberal bourgeoisie and its Marxist allies being countenanced in their desire to apply the brakes, in the event of the fascist rebellion’s being defeated in its first stages…in the course of the people’s victory its democratic illusions would be dispelled; should it go otherwise, the nightmare of dictatorship will annihilate us. No matter who opens the hostilities seriously, democracy will perish between two fires because it is irrelevant and has no place on the field of battle. Either fascism or social revolution… Beginning right now and for the period remaining until the reopening of Parliament — if the sources of danger noted by us should persist — militants ought to contrive frequent comings together in each locality by means of the usual organs of liaison, and keep in touch with the confederal committees so that the latter may keep them au fait with the course of events and undertake coordinated activity. Albeit in an irregular fashion, a will to fight must be displayed. Anything is better than our remaining on the fence and being exterminated by the dark hordes through our incredulity, while the others are loaded with chains …’[193]

The backs of the defeated right were now against the wall. Like their socialist predecessors in 1934 they, too, had refused to accept the decisions of the electorate. President Zamora was approached to hand over power to General Franco. Clearly, the socially conservative, corporate state would not be introduced legally. For Gil Robles and the classes he represented, the die had been cast. As Paul Preston notes:

‘December 1935 and February 1936 revealed that the end was more important than the means. Once convinced that the legal road to corporativism was blocked, he did everything possible to help those who were committed to violence. He had already made two crucial contributions to the success of the 1936 rising. The first, of which he was later to boast, was the creation of mass right-wing militancy. The other was the undermining of socialist faith in the possibilities of bourgeois democracy.’[194]

Four days after the elections, on 20 February, the rightists met to begin finalizing their conspiratorial plans. They agreed to embark on a strategy of tension that would culminate in a military uprising and the overthrow of the bourgeois liberal regime.

From February, events rumbled towards their climax on 19 July. Unemployment continued to rise and the agrarian reforms were deliberately ignored by the landed oligarchy. From 20 February until 19 July it was a period of latent civil war throughout much of the country; there were an estimated 113 general strikes and 228 partial stoppages; 1,287 people were wounded in clashes with the security forces or political confrontations, and 269 people killed. There were 213 recorded assassinations, or attempted assassinations, the majority of them carried out by gunmen of the Falange Española, the Spanish fascist organization called into being by a desperate and cornered agrarian capitalist class. In the town of Yeste, in Albacete, for example, 17 peasants were killed and a similar number wounded defending their land against the Civil Guard who had been ordered to clear it for the building of a reservoir. Land seizures by landless peasants also increased. In Madrid there was a major strike of building workers organized by the CNT and supported by the UGT. This strike, which began with 40,000 workers and soon rose to over 100,000, gave an enormous boost to the CNT unions in Madrid, at the expense of the UGT.

Against this tense background the Fifth Extraordinary Congress of the CNT was held in Zaragoza on 1 May 1936. It was to be the last regular CNT Congress to meet on Spanish soil until 1977. Attending were 649 delegates representing 982 unions with a combined membership of 550,595, including the opposition treintista unions who had been invited along in an attempt to resolve the differences within the Confederation. There had been a considerable drop in membership, particularly in Catalonia where membership had been falling steadily since its all-time high of 321,394 in August 1931. The Andalucian Regional was the majority delegation representing 156,000 workers. Close behind them came the Catalans (140,000), after which came the Levante (50,000, Center (39,000), Aragón (35,000), Galicia (23,000), and Asturias (22,731).

Items on the Agenda included agrarian reform, an inquest on the revolutionary risings of 1933 and the October revolt of 1934, the question of a possible revolutionary alliance with the socialist UGT union, and the drawing up of a thorough and clear statement of the principles and aims of Libertarian Communism as the objective of the CNT.

García Oliver, speaking as a delegate from the Barcelona Weaving and Textile Union, gave his view of the controversial issues on the Agenda, one that presumably reflected the view of the Nosotros group and the Defense Committees of the CNT as well as his own union branch:

‘Yesterday we stated that the revolution was feasible and we set out the reasons making our victory, the victory of Libertarian Communism, a possibility. Now again we say, as we did in 1931, that the revolution can be made. But in those days the CNT was the only force. Then there were superior circumstances of a revolutionary nature that have not recurred since. Today there is a strong state, disciplined troops, an arrogant bourgeoisie, etc. And although revolution is possible, and we are confident of it, it is no longer the same as in the days of 1931… Today the revolution is shared with other forces and at this very Congress we must examine the possibility of joint action with the UGT.’

He then moved on to discuss the alleged influence of the FAI on the CNT:

‘Another issued raised, though it too cannot furnish any reason [for a split] is the question of the trabazón [the special relationship between the CNT and FAI in matters relating to defense and solidarity]. Many within the CNT share the thinking of the Opposition unions on this point — but they do not break away from the CNT on account of it. The union I myself represent will be proposing a new system of structuring the prisoners’ aid committees by union. The CNT has not played second fiddle to the FAI. Quite the contrary. The anarchist groups have served the CNT as the instruments of its struggle. But there has been no interference. Can one make an issue out of the fact when today what is being advocated is alliance with the socialists who, when all is said and done, stand for a quite different way of thinking? It is a question of interpretation of doctrines, a question of majorities and minorities…

‘I said earlier, that during the squabble between the Opposition and the CNT we used all sorts of weapons to secure victory. But only in an individual capacity. Collectively we were defeated. When we sought to foist directors whom we preferred upon Solidaridad Obrera, we picked up only a handful of votes. But we did not announce any split. We went on fighting, zealously. And we went to the 1931 Congress. There, too, we were defeated, but we were not wiped out in terms of the votes: by then we had support. We went later to the Calle de Cabanas Plenum and this time we won and within four days the treintista manifesto had appeared.

‘Comrades, minorities always win through when they have right on their side. Let everyone learn from us. Let everybody strive to win over the majority as we do strive. Anyone who has right on his side yet does not win through... it is because he lacks energy. Struggle wins, but let the agreements worked out at the organization’s gatherings be respected by one and all. Let observance of them be the norm. But let us all remain within the Confederation.’[195]

Reformists and ‘planners’ alike saw the resolutions agreed by the Zaragoza Congress as a victory for the revolutionary wing of the anarchist movement. Cesar M. Lorenzo described it as ‘the total triumph of the FAI’. Horacio Prieto (Lorenzo’s father), a one-time ‘pure’ anarchist who had turned completely about to become one of the most outstanding representatives of confederal reformism, was virulently opposed to what he described as the ‘ultras’ of both wings. Piqued by Congress’s adoption of the Puente-inspired resolution on Libertarian Communism against his recommendations, a resolution which he described as the libertarian movement enveloping itself in ‘a universe of dreams’, this ‘ultra’ of the mythic center (also, incidentally, a FAI affiliate) resigned as national secretary of the CNT. [196] FAI Peninsular Secretary de Santillán, frustrated perhaps at Congress passing over his own minutely detailed economic plan, described the resolution as being ‘insufficient for a modern economic state’. [197]