History of the revolution in Spain—Political centralism—The working class organizations—The First Republic surrenders to the Monarchy—The Second Republic and its ineffectiveness

Spain still lives, we have witnessed one of the epic sagas of its vitality, and for that reason alone we have faith in its future. For close to four centuries every imaginable method was tried to destroy the sources of its existence, and our history, starting with national unification under the Catholic Monarchs, is a martyrology of liberty rarely interrupted by brief periods of resurrection, popular action, and reconstruction of the old tolerant and generous Iberian home. No other nation, no other people, would have been able to endure, without succumbing, what Spain endured in the centuries-long struggle between the two mentalities, the two irreconcilable compass points of its development: revolution and reaction, progress and obscurantism. Are there two Spains, two Spanish races, that cannot coexist on one Peninsula?

These two Spains cannot be identified with today’s fashionable terminology of left and right, liberal and conservative; we have often seen the same contradictions in both extremes, the same internal repulsions, and the most contrary aspirations. The Spanish civil war has very deep roots, and there were many occasions when one could perhaps note a closer affinity between what might at first glance seem to be irreconcilable elements than among those who are in one or another of the opposed camps. Are we not still suffering from the incompatibility of the bloodlines and the mentality that entered Spain via the Pyrenees, in contrast to our African heritage, with respect to blood and soul? Are we not still performing as unconscious actors in a historical, geographical, political and cultural contest between two worlds that have not been able to merge into a national synthesis? Do we not need a crucible that would merge us and unite us or an analysis that would separate us and define us, in order to some day, some time, achieve the perfect mixture? When Freemasonry organized in Europe, it entered Spain via the Pyrenees and infiltrated its adepts and its organization into our territory, and even the reflections of its internal rivalries, with its Scottish rite and its reformed rite. In opposition to these ideologies and imported forms of secret organization, the Confederation of the comuneros was constituted, the Sons of Padilla, a national organization, influenced by its time, but formed as a reaction against the exoticism of the imported rites. Freemasons and comuneros fought for a new Spain of justice and liberty, but their incompatibility was insuperable. Was it merely a question of rivalry, or was it the product of the two Spains to which we have referred?

Of all the great currents of modern social thought that have been represented in our country, one has remained ideologically bound to Europe—Marxism, communism—and the other, the libertarian tendency, has developed as a profoundly national force, much more so than it would have wanted to admit before July 19, 1936. The contradiction between these two manifestations of socialism is complete, and their fusion is as hard to bring about as that of the forces of reaction and revolution as such. If we advocated a non-aggression pact between these two conflicting branches of socialism, we always did so under the premise that each of them would have to preserve its characteristics and its autonomy. Good concord, but never a merger. Just as there is an incompatibility between the forces that declare their adherence to the cause of progress, so, too, is there an incompatibility between the forces that lay claim to the cause of conservatism, and proclaim, as in 1823, after the invasion of the One Hundred Thousand Sons of San Luis under the command of the Duke of Angoulême, “Long live the chains of slavery, and death to the nation!” And so, too, is there a temperamental kinship between that other kind of Spaniard, the one that fights for his birthplace, for his culture, for the environment in which he was raised, etc., on the other side of the barricades, of the Iberian tradition that, at particular moments, returns to its roots and causes contradictory types to appear in our history, in their conduct and their ideas. Ours is a tragic destiny in this struggle between two worlds, between two legacies that are fighting for survival on our soil: Europe and Africa, a struggle manifested in its instruments and banners by liberals and ultramontanists, constitutionalists and absolutists, republicans and monarchists, phalangists and fascists! The temporary extermination of the losing side has never been able to be thoroughly carried out, because among the victors, sooner or later, Iberianism must once again emerge, like a Trojan Horse, to undermine the European element, and now totalitarian fascism, which will not escape this law, either. Within the ranks of victorious fascism at this very moment, the Spaniard of the defeated side will reemerge and, while on the one hand the Europeanists of the right and those of the left will recognize each other as brothers, those who bear another blood and another spirit, from the most opposite poles, will know how to identify each other to defend the eternal cause of Spanish liberty. From this conflict between the two Spains, from these two historical legacies, a few intellectuals have arisen who have sought to take a position equidistant from the two extremes, such as Martínez de la Rosa, for example, with his Royal Statutes [1834], or Manuel Azaña with the Constitution of 1931, both of whom were condemned in advance to not satisfying either side and to fomenting the civil war whose purpose was to put an end to such fantasies.

The deep-rooted interest of foreign powers in not allowing a real, broad-based resurrection of Spain, due to their fear of its possible economic power and its strategic position, has always contributed to maintaining our decadence, in some cases by means of military intervention—the France of Chateaubriand—and in other cases by the advocacy of nonintervention—the France of Leon Blum. Perhaps this latest European war will bring an end to the primacy of all these powers, democratic or totalitarian, enemies of a Spain that would be the master of its own destiny, and, without their interference in our internal affairs, the Europeanizing influence would cease to divide us, so that Spain would become, if not the beginning of Africa, then at least the natural bridge between the European and the African, more closely connected to the African than to the European, as history, ethnography and geography teach us. We have nothing in common with nationalism, but we are patriots of the Spanish people, and we feel every foreign invasion as a mortal wound, either in the form of military forces or as ideas that are not assimilable by our people. The term traditionalist is applied precisely to those who have the least to do with Spanish tradition, the supporters of imported monarchies, Austrian or Bourbon, and the supporters of Roman Catholicism, while those who uphold the purest and the most glorious Iberian traditions are presented as anti-Spanish. If there are traditionalists in Spain, we stand in the vanguard of this tradition, and we only see Spanish solutions for our age-old problems, solutions that are as far-removed from Russian communism as they are from Italo-Germanic fascism or spineless French liberalism. This is why we are isolated and this explains our hostility towards the parties and organizations of the so-called left that receive their slogans or their ideologies from bad copies of European models; we were so isolated and they were so hostile towards us that, basically, they treated us as if we were the ones who declared war. Both sides seem to us, as parties and tendencies, foreigners in Spain.[4]

In every Spanish civil war, the belligerent forces were arbitrarily formed, and many who should have come to an agreement regarding their quality as Spaniards, their unquenchable morale, and their ultimately identical aspirations, fought each other to the death. We are very deeply moved, for example, by the respect and affection displayed by Zumalacarregui, a Carlist, towards his enemy Mina, and history preserves testimonials of the admiration shown for General Diego León, an absolutist shot after a failed plot, by his own enemies, those who had condemned him to death. These conflicts have witnessed the involvement of, and indeed the leading roles played by, on both sides, those who had even a minimal connection with the real spiritual Spain, who should have set aside their petty individual interests and lived together in perfect harmony.

Despite the differences that separate us, we see something of this spiritual kinship in José Antonio Primo de Rivera, a combative man, a patriot, in search of solutions for the future of his country. Prior to July 1936 he made various attempts to meet with us. While all the police in the Republic were incapable of discovering the role we played in the F.A.I., Primo de Rivera knew all about us, in his role as the leader of another clandestine organization, the Spanish Falange. At that time, for reasons of time-honored tactical considerations, we did not want to enter into any kind of relations with him. We did not even have the courtesy to acknowledge our receipt of the documents that he sent to us in order to acquaint us with some of his thoughts, assuring us that they could constitute a basis for joint action in favor of Spain. Once the war broke out, he was imprisoned, condemned to death and executed. Argentinian anarchists requested that we intercede to prevent him from being shot. We were incapable of preventing his execution, due to the uncongenial relations between us and the central government, but we thought at the time, and we still think, that the shooting of José Antonio Primo de Rivera was a mistake; Spaniards of that kind, patriots like him, are not dangerous, not even in the ranks of the enemy. They are among those who are loyal to Spain and uphold the cause of Spain even from opposed camps, erroneously chosen as the most suited for their generous aspirations. How the fate of Spain may have differed if an agreement between us would have been tactically possible, as Primo de Rivera thought advisable!

There was only one means of coexistence between the two races who eventually populated our territory: mutual tolerance. Tolerance, however, after so many centuries, since the introduction of the Roman Catholic Church and the invasion of the foreign monarchies, is a little-known and inaccessible phenomenon for the Europeanizing party, for the Holy Alliance of the past, and for fascism and communism today. Tolerance and generosity are much more at home in the authentic Spanish temperament. A historian of our 19^th century has written: “Among us, terrorism is connected to reaction, whereas in other countries it shared this feature with revolution; to tyranny corresponds the privilege of degrading reprisals and atrocities, unworthy of any nation that has not been submerged in the most repugnant barbarism: in Spain, the triumphant moment of liberty has always been an extremely generous amnesty.”[5]

When history ceases to be the classical chronicle of kings and tyrants, that is, of the privileged classes, and becomes the history of the people in all their manifestations and sentiments, few countries will offer the wealth of heroism and tenacity that is offered by the Spanish people, from their most remote origins, in their never-ending struggle to free themselves from religious, political and social slavery. The history of Spain can be interpreted as a rebellion that began with the resistance to the Roman invasion by rebels who went beyond the political struggle, like Viriathus, a rebellion that has still not ended even today, because the causes that engendered it still exist.[6]

The names of the parties, the colors of their flags, and the ideological categories have changed; but the racial kinship and the similar essence of the efforts of Viriathus, fighting against the Roman and indigenous nobles, and of Durruti, leading an enthusiastic mass of combatants to liberate Zaragoza from military oppression, is undeniable.

Mainstream historians have always had the preoccupation of casting a veil over the course of history and making it revolve, like a merry-go-round, around the leading representatives of political power, while obscuring and denigrating the memory of those who brandished the banner of freedom against that same power. The truth will out, however, and although separated from us by a vast gulf of time, the defeated rebels of Villalar, for example, are much more glorious and inspirational for the generations that came after them than the memory of their victorious enemies. They symbolized the struggle of the native, of the African, against invasion, on that occasion against the invasion of monarchist absolutism, a concept that was completely unknown in the practical politics of a people who addressed their kings in the familiar fashion and chose them so that they would act justly, and if they did not, then they based their actions on all the doctrines of the right of insurrection and the righteousness of regicide against tyrants.

The heroes of freedom, in every epoch, did not have fawning and ingratiating writings to transmit their memory to the future and, until the advent of modern socialism—disregarding for now the fact that some of its fractions have hated the revolution like sin, according to the expression of the Social Democrat Ebert—every rebellion against ecclesiastical and feudal tyranny was anathematized as a crime that could only be expiated on the gallows.

If we could ever make the real past of our people come alive, it would be the most sympathetic and admired past in the world. What can be said of our generation or of the generations that immediately preceded ours, is nothing but a small sample of what could be said of all the generations that have passed since the most remote times.

We, the Spaniards of our time, have created nothing new, neither those of the right wing nor those of the left, neither the revolutionaries nor the reactionaries: we have only followed a trail that was already blazed by our ancestors and that we reaffirmed so that our children can continue along that same path.

Although centralist domination, always deadly for freedom, was finally imposed in Spain after four centuries of struggles, the struggle for freedom has not ceased for even a single moment. There was no truce between the decentralizing forces of progress and the forces of conservatism and regression, the supporters of centralism. Whenever our people have succeeded, in one circumstance or another, in raising their heads, and turning their aspirations and their instincts into realities, we have seen the essence of the old African Iberianism reestablished, to which the Arabian invasion only added spontaneously constituted local and provincial committees with the popular elements of greater prestige; these committees federated among themselves and then gave rise to the network of a federation of free republics, which then set forth their general policy decisions in the communal Cortes. A confederation of republics was, in fact, the force that made war on Napoleon, and a confederation of republics was the force that, throughout the entire 19^th century, fought for freedom against absolutism. It was by way of that same path that we sought to raise the banner of progress and freedom, but on that occasion the centralizing forces—republicans, socialists and communists—split the population and led it astray as much as possible from its natural inclinations. With political centralization—imported from foreign countries by kings of other races and by the Roman Church imposed by those kings—we reaped poverty, collapse, ignorance; with creative freedom, with the federation of diverse regions, we were the light of the world.

All centralism bears within it the germ of fascism, regardless of the name and of the appearances that surround it. This is how Pi y Margall, a disciple of Proudhon, understood it, and this is what made that extraordinary man such a well-respected figure in Spanish political life. The decline of Spain in every respect began with its political and administrative centralization. This was the source of the misfortunes and miseries that have dragged us down, like a ball and chain, during the subsequent centuries. Before the time of the Catholic kings, Spain was the most brilliant focal point of European civilization, and the emporium of world industry. All of this was dried up by centralization. The fields were left fallow; more than forty famous universities in the world of culture were transformed into dens of spiritual obscurantism; the manufacturing centers disappeared and poverty took the place of the old prosperity and the old greatness. Our population was reduced to slightly more than 7 million, where more than 40 million had lived before.

The so-called Arab rule was never a centralizing domination; its liquidation was represented to posterity as a religious question, disregarding the fact that its deep roots and its success in Spain were due to the circumstance that it only signified a reinforcement of the Iberian, Berber spirit itself. It allowed the maximum amount of autonomy to each region and even an admirable religious tolerance in which Christians, Arabs and Jews lived together peacefully and without envy, each practicing their own rites, sometimes even in the same temple, but all of them working together for prosperity and well-being on the same land. Spain was the model and the vanguard of all countries, which envied its advances, its literature, its science, its industry and its agriculture. All of these factors were ruined in the united monarchist regimes. History teaches us just this, and hence our mistrust of all political centralization and our support for every demand for autonomy and regional independence.

Centralism was the main cause of the demise of the impulse that defeated the military revolt in most of Spain, and without the action and the inspiration of the genius of the people, when military, administrative, political, and propagandistic centralization were imposed by terror and violence, the colossus of July 19 was reduced to the level of an Indalecio Prieto or a Negrín, and at this level nothing else can be expected other than what we got, a shameful and ignominious defeat. Spain does not shine just because of the category of its leadership; if there is anything that is permanently great and worthy of admiration, it is its people. This people, however, by racial instinct, if we may use that term, stands in irreducible opposition to all centralism, and in order for it to assume its rightful place it needs a different apparatus than that of an insensate and incapable central bureaucracy; it needs the traditional federation of regions and provinces and the freedom to exercise its fruitful initiative and its valiant powers of decision.

In no other country have the trade union organizations of the workers been so cruelly persecuted; but nowhere else have they set down such deep roots as in Spain. Nor is there any other country where the workers organizations have fought with such tenacity against the educational system led by the Church and by the State, such as we have in Spain, and this condition of ignorance that is so zealously preserved is responsible for many absurdities and also for many excesses in our past, where we find a people that is passionately devoted to freedom while at the same time worshiping the most disgusting tyrants as idols.

One of the statesmen of the First Republic, Fernando Garrido, in a speech in the Cortes Constituyentes in 1869, spoke of a typical episode from the times of Isabel II, but one that is not at all unusual, and is in fact constantly repeated, in every epoch: there was a kind of catacomb in the city of Reus, where, shrouded in mystery, the young workers of that area gathered to learn to read and to write, arithmetic, and other kinds of knowledge. In order to attend their lessons they had to evade the vigilance of the authorities and keep the location of their instructional center a secret, since it was a very serious crime. Education was in the hands of the Church and under its rigorous censorship. And what can you expect from people who proclaim, with Alvarado, that it is better to be wrong with Saint Basil and Saint Augustine than to be right with Descartes and Newton, and who declare that philosophy is “the science of evil”, as it was characterized by a an ecclesiastical jurist in Burgos in 1825, García Morante?

The saying of Bravo Murillo has become legendary, when he was presented with a request to legalize the school founded by Cervera, a much-admired popular educator, in Madrid, in order to teach the workers to read and write: “Here we don’t need men who think, but oxen that work”.

Those who have written histories of the medieval guilds, of which the modern syndicalism of Spain is a faithful continuation, although the resurrection of ideologies founded on that natural sense of association of the exploited in France and in other places has made this word popular to characterize their own movements, could only admire the perseverance and the skill that characterize the combative spirit of solidarity of the Spanish worker and peasant in defense of their rights. Despite the efforts made by the Church and the ruling classes of the State to morally and physically enthralled them, the workers and peasants were able to organize and to meet together either in public or secretly, facing all the consequences. Representative of this spirit were the rebellions of the peasant farmers of the Remensa in the 14^th century, the Brotherhoods of Valencia and Mallorca in 1519–1522, the comuneros in 1521, the Catalonian nyeros of the 16^th century, one of whose last chiefs, Perot Rocaguinarda, appears in the adventures of Don Quijote. And that same work of Cervantes, written in a period of when the fortunes of the anti-popular forces were waxing: is it not replete with references to other, better times, situated in the past, in the golden age of freedom and justice?

Throughout the entire 19^th century there were dozens of armed insurrections of the workers and peasants who were seeking to reconquer their lost freedom and to establish a regime of social justice. What our contemporaries saw in the deeds of the libertarian movement, was also seen by previous generations in the men of the International, a name they assumed between 1868 and shortly before the end of the century, and in many earlier manifestations of various kinds of desires for a new life, for spiritual renewal and for economic transformation in a progressive sense, that were frustrated but never completely exterminated. And after so many years the combative spirit has never changed. General Pavía, a López Ochoa of another time, said, referring to the battles that he had to fight in Seville against our predecessors, that the internationals fought like lions.

Proletarian revolt was a constant phenomenon in Spain, just as constant as the reaction unleashed by the forces that opposed progress and enlightenment. The Barcelona general strike of 1855, launched to demand the right to freedom of association against the dictatorship of General Zapatero, has been enshrined in the annals of history. Consider the insurrectionary movements of 1902, which astounded the world proletariat because of the sense of discipline, combativeness and organization that the workers of Catalonia, cited as models in all modern social literature, displayed. Consider the rebellion of July 1909 against the infamous slaughter being carried out in Morocco, which was not intended to colonize and conquer that African region, but to justify unmerited promotions in the ranks of a Pretorian army, created by the monarchy to use and misuse as it saw fit. These events provided an excuse for the Catholic Church to destroy the schools created by Ferrer, a 20^th century Cervera, which threatened to become a great movement of spiritual liberation. Recall the insurrectionary movements of August 1917, in which the working class made the Bourbon monarchy aware of its determination to fight for its emancipation. Recall the endless series of conspiracies during the period of Primo de Rivera, and the bold attacks of the anarchists in Barcelona, in Zaragoza and other places, attacks that, while not leading to victory, at least kept the sacred fire of revolt burning.

The First Republic, which was a republic “more in name than in reality”, according to Salmerón, one of its presidents, was shattered in its battle against social progress, and, not wanting to satisfy the demands of the people and to openly embark on the road of reform, of the return to the sovereignty of the real Spain, it devoted itself to the task of looking all over the world for a king who was qualified for the job of filling a vacant throne. In 1931 as in 1868, the centralists, although they called themselves republicans, made themselves the masters of the situation, and they had more affinities, then as now, with the monarchy or with any other reactionary system than with an openly republican and social, or federative, regime. While the centralists openly conspired, even from their positions in the government, in favor of the monarchy, the International was fought tooth and nail, working class organizations were prohibited and their members were persecuted using procedures that are reminiscent of the formula that prevailed many years later, in attaining similar results: “Aim for the belly!” and “No wounded, no prisoners”.

Our civil wars have almost always been predominantly characterized by social preoccupations. They have not, as in other nations, been wars of an essentially political nature merely in the sense of individuals, dynasties or classes. They were struggles between reaction and revolution. When the reactionaries win, they openly proclaim, as in the decree of October 17, 1824, that they will pursue the goal of erasing “forever from Spanish soil even the faintest idea that sovereignty resides anywhere but in my royal person” (Ferdinand VII). If the revolution is victorious, it immediately creates the instruments to affirm freedom, the committees, and the federation of provinces and regions, reestablishing popular sovereignty.

The First Republic did not arise solely from the decomposition of a decaying, degenerate and disastrous dynasty, but, above all, from the demands of the liberal and revolutionary forces that were seeking progress in every domain.

The inauguration of the Second Republic prevented the outbreak of a profound popular revolution that was thought to be inevitable. This Republic did not, however, solve any of the problems it faced and within the first few months of its existence it was discredited due to the vices that originated from its ineffectiveness and its anti-proletarian nature. The people, which voted for it one day at the ballot boxes, wanted to take an effective step forward towards their own well being and towards that minimum of liberation and of the reconquest of their sovereignty that the philosophers and republican statesmen either did not know how to achieve, or did not want to restore, or were incapable of restoring. The people wanted to use the Republic as a ladder, although they were hardly skilled enough, to build the framework of a third Spain, one that was equally removed from the two Spains that traditionally, for many centuries, were fighting to direct life and thought in the Iberian Peninsula. It was a total failure. There is nothing worse than half-measures, people who want to be everything for everybody, and ambiguities, in great historical crises.