Industry, transport and agriculture in the hands of the workers—The revolution in the economy—The agrarian collectives—The revolution in culture—War and revolution

Concerning certain matters about which we cannot remain silent, it will be the victors in the Spanish conflict that will inflict harm on the people of July 19–20, but history and living memory will cause the great constructive ability of eternal Spain, an ability that is unique in the world and especially in countries that have suffered as we have, to survive as a definitive acquisition. Even for those who were the most fervent believers in the virtues of our people, it was an unforgettable revelation.

From what mysterious sources of inspiration did so many marvels arise spontaneously, prodigies of common accord and efficient economic reconstruction, in industry, agriculture, mining, and transport, everywhere? There is no doubt that in this eternal Spain, crushed for centuries by foreign political and religious rule, a great number of seeds of resurrection were sown, but the main driving force was the spirit of the people themselves, ennobled by its suffering in grievous servitude. And this seed was sown all over the land, from heart to heart, from brother to brother and from parents to children.

The glitter of the so-called literary generations hardly affected the soul of the people; however, few were the Andalusian peasants, even though they were illiterate, who did not have, even if only in private, something of the memory, of the yearning, of the fervent apostolic mission of a Fermín Salvochea.

This Spain, which does not feature prominently in any bibliographies, which has no flashy orators in the legislature, which has no other representatives than anonymous apostles, victims of the most atrocious persecutions and the most inhuman martyrdoms, was unknown. Very few foreigners plumbed these depths, nor did very many of the conscious and unconscious representatives of anti-Spanish Europeanization, whether on the right or the left, know anything about what had germinated at the cost of enormous sacrifices in the Spanish soul. Every region, every major town, every trade and every industry had its own Fermín Salvochea, the hero and martyr of a long-awaited resurrection of the spirit of the race.

All of its enemies may curse and denounce the epic of July 1936 to March 1939; but although it would be very much to their liking, they cannot be ignorant of the fact that during that period the Spanish people, by intuition and conviction, embarked on the true road of economic and social reconstruction, that the capacity and efficiency of organized labor in industry and agriculture have never before been surpassed and never will be surpassed unless Spain once again takes that same road, the road of July, which encountered just as much incomprehension and just as much animosity in the Republic of April 14, 1931 as it did among the leaders of the military revolt of 1936.

Our victory necessarily entailed a shift of the locus of leadership of the economy and public life, for the latter at least during the first few days of the new system, away from the men who represented the interests of capitalism and who were associated with the military revolt.

Most of the leading figures of big industry, the major landowners and the big financiers, had fled the country, and it was revealed that the total amount of capital flight from bank accounts during the two weeks preceding the military revolt was in excess of 90,000,000 pesetas, which proves their complicity and their knowledge of what was being planned.

At six a.m. on the morning on July 19, we took over the Casa de Cambó and the Fomento del Trabajo [the headquarters of the Employers Association], a veritable fortress, when we saw the threat of a possible enemy attempt to advance via the Paseo de Gracia to link up with the barracks of Avenida Icaria and the Military General Headquarters [Capitania General]. All the offices had been totally evacuated, right down to the service staff. The big capitalists had fled in anticipation of the revolt, some due to their high profile and their past, others because they were afraid of the ravages of the civil war that they had subsidized.

The workers took possession of all social wealth, factories, mines, surface and maritime transport, the estates of the big landowners [latifundistas], public services and the most important branches of trade and commerce. Workers control committees were spontaneously organized in all enterprises, in which manual and technical workers collaborated, together with, on many occasions, the former owners who came to terms with the new situation and wanted to be employed within the new revolutionary economy, to give it a name that distinguishes it from the previous kind of economy, and to be workers or technicians like everyone else.

It is hard to imagine the complexity of the problems that this social convulsion caused, with the breakdown of all the old relations and the creation of a new way of life. And all of this took place simultaneously with the prosecution of a war that forced us to send 30,000 men to the Aragon front, not to count the auxiliary units in the rearguard. The presence of 30,000 men on the front required the efforts, in industry and agriculture, of two hundred thousand men. This entire mechanism had to be created and organized from scratch, without the most indispensable raw materials and machinery, under the worst imaginable conditions.

Some industries reached efficiency sooner than others. For example, we should call attention to the magnificent organization of urban transport, rail transport and maritime transport. Under the former administration we would never have expected these services to be so perfectly and precisely operated as they were after July. Besides good organization, there was also good will, the conscious support and widespread emulation of the cause that we defended that the old system could not coax from the workers with the lure of higher wages alone.

We must also point out that many of these workers, the railroad workers, the urban rail workers and the sailors, for example, were some of the lowest-paid workers in Spain, yet they nonetheless agreed to continue to work for the same poverty wage, despite the vastly more intense labor that they had voluntarily imposed on themselves, until many months after they had taken the management of their industries into their own hands. And even during the last days of the war, when the devaluation of the peseta had raised prices to astronomical levels, ticket prices for transportation services were still the same as they were before the war.

If the transport industry as a whole did not operate on the day after our victory in July with the same number of scheduled stops as it did the day before, nor did it strictly adhere to the schedules under the new management of the revolutionary workers, the reason was not because the workers were incapable of meeting these demands, but due to our need to conserve fuel for military transport.

And the whole fleet, both the merchant marine and the navy, in the hands of the sailors and technicians, demonstrated a capacity for unlimited achievements. Nothing could stand in its way; as long as the sailors of our navy had control over the ships, the sea was ours, initiative and the element of surprise were in our hands. When, thanks to the work of the Russians and their agents in the central government, an attempt was made to impose “order” in the navy, we lost our rule of the seas. In the merchant marine not only did heroism attain new heights, but so did the effectiveness with which every ship could be used for the service of the new Spain.

And while the transport system demonstrated sufficient evidence of ability and responsibility when it was transferred from the management of the former business owners to the management of the workers and technicians themselves, the transformation of peacetime to military production in industry was carried out with astonishing speed. Everyone knows that in order to wage a modern war, the support of a large industrial base operating 24 hours a day is indispensable.

The mechanism of the new economy was simple: each factory created its new managerial department on the basis of its blue collar, administrative and technical personnel. The factories within each industry associated at a local level and formed the Local Federation of their industry. All the Federations of all the industries together constituted something along the lines of a Local Council of the Economy, in which all the centers of production, communications, exchange, health and sanitation, culture and transport were represented. These Local Councils of the Economy sent representatives to a Regional Council of the Economy, and each Local Federation of each industry was also represented on a Regional Federation of Industry, and then a permanent link was established between the Regional Federations of Industry and the Regional Councils of the Economy.[15]

Even the boldest capitalist program, at the highest level of capitalist organization, has never been able to attain, in the advanced countries, such a degree of efficiency, taking advantage of one hundred percent of all the possibilities of each industry, on the local, regional and national scale.

For many people, the revolution is something that happens in the streets; fighting on the barricades, the revenge of the people, and everything else associated with a major upheaval in the age-old routine.

We never confused the revolutionary stage-scenery of the first phase with the essence of the revolution, and we have not hesitated to set forth the orientation needed to really carry out the revolution that the masses were discussing and for which they had long yearned, and which was also viewed with a great deal of sympathy among non-proletarian sectors of the population.

For us, the revolution was above all the creation of wealth and its equitable distribution to the whole population, the increase of general well-being thanks to the contributions and harmonious and efficacious organization of the common efforts, the labor of justice. We did not want a social transformation that would subsist in poverty, but one that would enable everyone to enjoy a higher standard of living; and this standard of living to which we aspired had to be conquered, not with weapons of war, but with the instruments of labor in the factories, the mines, the fields, and the schools.

The war was a terrible misfortune, an obstacle on the road, a necessity imposed by the defense of our newly-won privileges, rather than a creative element of the real revolution.

From the very first day of the war, we had to face an alarming shortage of raw materials, in a region that has hardly any minerals, fiber crops or hydrocarbon resources. We lacked coal for industry and transport. The average consumption of coal in Catalonia was between five and six thousand tons per day, and the only operational mines, providing low-quality coal, hardly yielded, even with more intensive exploitation, three hundred tons per day. In a few months we managed to raise this figure to a thousand; even so, however, the shortage of coal was a constant tragedy, especially with regard to the shortage of the higher grades of coal used for the metal industry.

Asturias could have made a major contribution, but one of its leaders, Amador Fernández, responded to our requests by saying that he would rather see the coal of Asturias pile up at the pitheads or on the docks at Musel than to see it fall into the hands of the Catalonians; in the meantime, Asturias lacked the textiles that we had in abundance and other elements that we offered to provide.

We drew up plans for, and took the first few steps towards, the electrification of the rail system, and while we were aware of all the difficulties that this task would entail, we were nonetheless also aware of the vast amount of electric energy at our disposal and the consequent rapid amortization of all the expenses that would be incurred by electrification. If, someday, Spain, regardless of the type of regime that rules over it, were to desire to take a decisive step forward in the direction of progress and civilization, the electrification of its rail system, which would entail a reduction in the cost of rail travel and transport in general and the construction of numerous new electric power generation plants, and therefore dams, factories, etc., would be one of its first steps.

We initiated a project to produce textiles from fiber crops that had not yet been used for this purpose to replace some of the cotton that we lacked; some of these programs will continue to be pursued in Spain, regardless of the type of political regime. We built large industrial facilities to process flax, hemp, esparto grass, rice straw and broom.

We built large cellulose factories that used domestic raw materials, and with regard to the metal and chemical industries, the fact that we did the same thing right in the middle of a revolution and a war must have impressed even our enemies, who have now found themselves in possession of an improved industrial base, but one that is twice as large as it was before the war. Produced for the first time in Spain were: metallic sodium, picric acid, ethylene dibromide, octanol, bromine…; substitutes were manufactured for numerous medicines that were formerly obtained from foreign countries. A large number of new factories were built, and factories that already existed were enlarged, in Levante and especially in Catalonia, by the industrial trade unions or at the initiative of the institutions that were created to promote war production.

In addition to the creation of these new enterprises, almost all industrial sectors experienced an unprecedented improvement of their entire industrial apparatus. What feats were not accomplished in terms of concentration and specialization? The wood products industry, for example, which began with cutting down the trees in the forests and ended in the furniture showrooms, introduced a rationalized system of labor, the assembly line, and thus took advantage of a 50 percent increase in the productivity of human labor.

And how can we not faithfully record, not to cite a thousand other cases, the organization of the dairy industry in Barcelona, which had no reason to envy the most modern dairies in the world, and which was entirely the work of the revolution? And on the day that, by the initiative of the state or private capitalism, something similar is achieved with respect to organization and efficiency that compares with what the Regional Federation of Peasants of Levante accomplished, with every kind of specialized agricultural labor, with the processing of its crops, with the distribution and marketing of its products, with its research laboratories, with its experimental farms, with its schools to train administrative staff for agrarian collectives, etc., we will then admit that the same result can be attained by other roads than the one we advocated. And this result must be achieved, by the efforts of whoever is capable of it, so that Spain can once again be the emporium of wealth, of prosperity and of culture that it once was in times past.

In certain industries it took longer to introduce the fresh air of the modern organization of labor, but we finally created strong foundations. In the clothing industry, for example. At first we had problems meeting the orders placed by the army, although we lacked neither fabric nor personnel; but the obstacles that slowed us down were merely so many lessons for us to learn and this sector, too, traditionally represented by small establishments and by domestic work, was organized in such a way that it was capable of meeting all the demands that were placed upon it.

We laid the foundations for exploiting the natural wealth of the country and its underground resources, which are not abundant in Catalonia, but which are capable of providing a respectable yield. Major deposits of lead were subjected to exploitation, the entire lead industry was organized and lead ore was sold to foreign buyers right in the middle of the war. Copper ore was also mined, smelted and electro-plated; manganese mines were opened that were previously thought to be unviable. We even began to search for oil with antiquated and inadequate drilling rigs.

Never before were so many economic initiatives undertaken in such a brief period of time. Their systematic elaboration put us on the road of a coordinated economy, and at the same time made us aware of what we were able to achieve in every respect and what was possible to achieve in the future. Seldom have those who have intervened in political life, as governmental professionals, done so with full knowledge of the economic possibilities of the country. Even in our revolutionary ranks, we had devoted much more effort and attention to the specific challenge of preparing for the insurrection than we did to real preparation for the constructive period after the revolution.

This explains the difficulties and the uncertainty of all our first steps. We understood that our mission was not that of the typical politics, that of reinforcing the power of your own party and filling up all the government positions with your party’s supporters; we believed that we had to devote ourselves, above all, to increasing the wealth and mobilizing all forces and all intelligence in the service of the revolution.

By way of each individual preconception, a magnificent unity of men of every class and every party was gradually forming, men who understood, as we did, that the revolution is something different from fighting in the streets and that, in a real revolution, those who feel predisposed in their hearts and are willing to contribute their physical, intellectual, administrative or technical effort to the common labor have nothing to lose.

The spontaneously generalized movement of confiscation of the social wealth by its manual, administrative and technical staff, in order to place it at the exclusive service of society, found a legal expression, on October 24, 1936, in the Collectivization Decree drafted by the Council of the Economy of Catalonia. This Decree was followed by other supplementary decrees that, taken as a whole, give us an approximate picture of the new economy of Catalonia.

Because the Committee of Militias, which at first had to address and resolve every problem, was gradually being transformed into a Ministry of War during wartime, in order to disencumber it of functions that could only obstruct the performance of its most important mission, we created a Council of the Economy of Catalonia, whose resolutions could not be vetoed by the National Ministry of the Economy. It operated under the authority of the Minister of the Economy in the Government of the Generalitat, and it was also composed of representatives from all the parties and organizations. It was this institution that was the source of all legislation of an economic nature that was implemented during the war and the revolution in the autonomous region of Catalonia.

We established a division of labor that was defined by the following categories: fuels and sources of energy, textiles, metals, construction, graphic arts and paper, finance, banks and foreign exchange, vocational training, chemicals, health and sanitation, etc.

The work performed by this Council of the Economy was impressive with regard to both its scope and its results, although we did not subscribe to the opinion of those who think that legislation implemented within the legal framework of a State is incapable of any lasting achievement. As long as it was possible for us to do so, by way of our own direct participation in the system, we sought to ensure that the Council of the Economy’s initiatives would legitimize what was being done on a daily basis in economic practice, and thereby promoted the maximum degree of respect for the supreme legislator, the people themselves. In this Council of the Economy, we at first served in the Department of Fuels and Sources of Energy, and in the performance of this role we proposed, as early as August or September 1936, that bomb-proof electric power generating stations should be constructed for Catalonia, whose main power plants were always in danger of being destroyed; despite the fact that our proposal and credits to finance it were approved, our successors in office said that our plans were unrealistic and they failed to implement the project, and it was the shortage of electric power that was one of the factors that led to the loss of the war. Andrés Nin headed the Department of Textiles; he always worked harmoniously with us and he was always on our side on major questions of principle.

What was most important, however, regardless of what was being studied and what legislation was being proposed by the Council of the Economy, was the creative labor of the workers and peasants themselves. During the first year of the revolution, forty percent more land was being cultivated than during the years immediately prior to the war. Every scrap of land was planted, no matter how unproductive.

The most unexpected development with regard to the question of economic construction was the phenomenon of the agrarian collectives. They were formed spontaneously throughout republican Spain, in Catalonia as well as in Aragon, in Levante as well as in Andalusia and Castille. No one—no party, no organization—issued the order to form collectives; but the peasantry proceeded with determination along this very road, with a confidence and a decisiveness that surprised and filled with admiration even those who had high expectations for the spirit of the Spanish people.

We must also point out that, in the practical implementation of this collective project, of the pooling of labor, of livestock, of land, and of machinery, there were no socialists or anarchists; all acted in the same way and competed with one another in emulation and understanding.

The research laboratories and testing facilities of the Peasants Federation of the Central Region were superior to those of the Ministry of Agriculture, and the Madrid Government itself had to use our agronomists and seek out their advice. The famous Agrarian Reform of the Republic was set aside and forgotten like old furniture and the only collectives that prospered were those formed by the peasants themselves, either by consolidating their individual parcels of land or by confiscating the large estates whose owners had fled to foreign countries or had joined the military revolt.

The improvements made to the land, the irrigation works, the new construction for housing and warehouses and workshops, are the enduring testimony of the work of the peasants, of their surprising progressive leap forward, and of their capacity for organization and ambition.

We had one inveterate enemy of the agrarian collectives: the Russians and their agents in the Spanish Communist Party. They went so far as to create dissident peasant organizations to undermine the work of the collectives in Levante, and these organizations were enthusiastically supported by the Ministry of Agriculture. They were a total failure, because the peasants of the UGT and those of the CNT had the same interests and the same aspirations; their alliance frustrated the plans of the communists. The communists then opened up the floodgates of calumny, claiming that violence had been used to force the peasants to join the collectives. We intervened, in both our official as well as our unofficial capacities, in cases where individuals complained of such abuses; we saw the truth with our own eyes and we had to defend the peasants against those who slandered their achievements.

We nonetheless issued a decree making it easier for individuals who wanted to do so to resign from the collectives, with their individual share of land and tools, seeds and animals. Hardly anyone left the collectives—quite the contrary. And as an example of the achievements of this attempt to break up the peasantry, we present the following fact: the peasant collective of Hospitalet de Llobregat, with 1,500 heads of family, proposed that those who were not happy with the collective would be given the opportunity to leave, with land and tools, because collectives can only exist as collectives of people who are willing members of the collective. Out of 1,500 people, five chose to leave, and these five individuals were not peasants but day laborers; even the former landowners did not want to leave the collective. And the five persons who did leave the collective were compelled to associate with one another, in turn, in order to work in common the land that the collective had given them.[16]

Agrarian collectivism, to whose history, both theoretical and practical, Joaquín Costa has devoted a large volume, is consubstantial with the spirit of the Spanish people. The collectives of Aragon, which embraced almost the entire peasant population of liberated Aragon, were later bloodily suppressed by the communist divisions in a clear attempt at provocation, a provocation that, nonetheless, did not work out as planned; the collectives were almost immediately restored, proving that the peasants really were in favor of them. In Aragon, all the collectives were formed by members and sympathizers of the CNT and, because it was impossible to intervene in them as a political party, in view of the fact that, on some day in the future, the economic organization must absorb and liquidate the separate existence of the parties themselves, and even liquidate the difference between the CNT and the UGT, in order to give birth to a single party and a single organization—Spain, the master of its fate and of its will—the hatred of all those who aspired to create party-based dictatorships as opposed to the creation of the Spanish people that will forever reject such dictatorships, was manifested with a terribly lethal virulence.

For many years before the July movement, we maintained that for a revolution to be really beneficial and for it to be firmly rooted in positive creations, the city must be brought closer to the countryside, and the industrial worker must be brought closer to the peasant.

It was our opinion after July 19 that neither efforts nor sacrifices should be spared to resolve this age-old historical divorce in a harmonious unity.

For a very brief period of time—and to find any vestiges of this we must look hundreds of years into the past—the peasants had a dominant position in the economic, political and social life of the people. Generally, the agricultural workers—as domestic serfs, as glebe serfs, as tenant farmers, as rabassaires, or as slaves properly speaking—constituted an underclass, a class of pariahs burdened with numerous duties, but with very few rights.

History can be interpreted in many ways, and there are fashionable interpretations for every taste. One such interpretation explains the past in the light of peasant servitude and the peasants’ spasmodic attempts to cast off their heavy yoke.

The peasant was, and still is for the most part, a beast of burden from the economic point of view, a submissive contributor to the treasury of the State, and a source of cannon fodder for the armies of kings and capitalists. Must this always be so? Is it not a fact that July 19 necessarily heralded the overcoming of the traditional divorce between the city and the countryside, between industry and agriculture?

From a sense of human solidarity and justice, and from the understanding of the far-reaching implications of this question, we anarchists were obliged to do everything in our power to bring about the brotherhood of the city and the countryside in a single aspiration for liberty and for productive and dignified labor. We were aware of the fact that unless this result is obtained, a revolution based on justice is not possible, and that the barometer of social progress is the degree to which the peasants are sincerely engaged in new realities and new ideas.

We might be appointed to cabinet positions, occupy high-level public offices, and have the unanimous support of the industrial workers. If we neglect the conquest of the hearts and minds of the peasants, however, it will all be for naught, and economic, social and political progress will only be a façade, an illusion, and a fraud.

With respect to the peasants, they have been systematically overlooked in their rural enclaves. Not even modern socialism made much headway among them, except in southern Spain, in contrast to its successful penetration of the main industrial centers. The welter of definitions and interpretations of the problem of the countryside that one finds in socialist doctrines is quite unconvincing. The conduct of the capitalist regime and the capitalist, monarchist or republican State merits even less consideration. And when these regimes have actually paid attention to the peasants, they did so only in order to exploit their ignorance and their good faith, to put the squeeze on them more effectively for the profit of the ruling castes. They only gave any thought to the peasants for the purpose of poisoning them from cradle to grave with the opium of religion and the hereafter; they thought of them as a docile source of taxes and customs duties, tithes and first fruits; they gave some thought to them in order to take their sons from them to serve the king or some other state abstraction; they paid attention to the peasants in order to extract from them, for a good price, the fruit of their labor without any limitations or restrictions.

This is how the whole civilization and all its progress and culture that we are so proud of looks like to the peasant: the priest who brutalized and deceived him; the tax collector to whom he gave all his savings; the Civil Guard that terrorized him. And yet there are still people who complain that the peasant is mistrustful and that this mistrust has been passed down by generations of peasants above all with respect to everything that comes from the cities. Even when the cities bring them liberty and justice, those who have so often been at the receiving end of treachery and deceit are right to look with suspicion on liberty and justice themselves!

They are not responsible for their mistrust, for their inherited, instinctive suspicion. The blame falls upon those of us who have turned our backs on the countryside to enjoy ordinary pleasures or the higher pleasures of culture, or a higher standard of living, in the cities; the culpability adheres to those of us who, capable of doing so and actually mandated to do so by our principles, have not carried out the same work of propaganda and persuasion among the workers of the land that we have among the workers in industry; the fault is ours, all of us who have tolerated the ongoing expropriation of the peasants in the name of God, of the King, or of the Republic, without doing anything on their behalf, as we did whenever it was a question of the exploitation and repression of the industrial workers.

We had to harvest the fruits of the oblivion to which we abandoned the peasant. That is, not having sown when the time was right, we cannot expect abundant harvests.

The revolution had to suffer the consequences of this dualism.

The success or failure of a revolution can be due to many causes. One of the most important is the nature of its agrarian policy. If it does not carry out its policies in such a way that the peasants willingly and actively, and even enthusiastically, support the new situation, the revolution will be irremediably lost. And to get their support, one must never for even a single minute forget that there is a major difference between the educational level of the industrial worker and that of the peasant; and that the same words have different meanings or are interpreted differently in the city and in the country, and that facts that are favorable for one side may be harmful to the other.

Generally speaking, with respect to the question of how to get our ideas across to the suspicious and mistrustful peasant, who is suspicious and mistrustful for good reasons, we have to employ an instrument of propaganda that is always effective, even if it seems much slower: the power of example, persuasion by everyday practice. We will always lose the game by following the road of violence, even if we crush all open resistance on the part of the peasants.

Without the sympathy and the active support of the agrarian population, all economic, political and social revolutions will collapse from impotence. Even if they think they are stronger because of their armies, even if they are encouraged by the relative ease with which they can suppress any outbreak of discontent! The history of all times and all revolutions teaches us that, on the road of progress, one cannot effectively proceed any further than where the peasants are capable of going voluntarily.

Almost spontaneously, everywhere, without awaiting directives, resolutions or recommendations, we have seen agrarian collectives arise that were composed, in their vast majority, by men from rural areas who had somehow been exposed to revolutionary ideas or who preserved latent traces of memories of practical forms of labor in common from their local traditions. Land was seized from the landowners who were sympathetic to the military revolt, all arable fallow land was cultivated, but instead of distributing all of this land in more or less equal shares, these lands were held in common along with their respective tools, machinery and livestock.

This was the real beginning of the revolution in agriculture. There were isolated cases where the process did not go smoothly; it was claimed that there were some attempts to use force. We were not able to confirm these allegations at first hand, quite the contrary; but we have no problem with admitting that they took place. Most of the time these particular incidents were unavoidable. They always happen, and always will happen, during the first phases of a vast social transformation.

The peasants, from whom we expected the least, were able to surpass all our expectations. We must point out that, of all the regions of so-called Republican Spain, Catalonia was the region in which this phenomenon of agrarian collectives was least developed, even though the agrarian collectives in Catalonia were numerous, large and efficiently managed. Why should we fear the future, why should we fear the republican or the communist counterrevolution, as long as the peasants, from a socialist or libertarian background, constituted the unbreakable force on the road of the real revolution?

The collectives sought to prove one thing: that labor in common was easier and that, when circumstances would permit large scale application of machinery to agriculture and the implemention of the results obtained by modern scientific research on hybrid seeds, the use of the appropriate fertilizers, and proper irrigation, not only will the labor of the countryside, performed in common, be healthier and easier, but it will also be infinitely more productive and beneficial.[17]

We needed an instrument to preach by way of example in the rural areas: this instrument was spontaneously formed by the agrarian collectives. Many years ago we had reached a similar conclusion. Preoccupied with this problem, and understanding perfectly the psychology of the land worker, and aware of the ineffectiveness of mere doctrinal propaganda, we called for the establishment of nuclei of communitarian agricultural labor, even if this meant buying land, although still within the capitalist economy.

In this way, by way of example, that was our position, we would be able to get through to the peasant population, and at the same time we would ourselves become factors for progress, prosperity and culture.

Then we had the right instrument right there in front of us, fruitful and full of promise. We did not have to speed up the process more than was necessary. In just a few years, the collectives turned the underclass of the peasants into the most solid and most innovative pillar of the new economic and social edifice.

You should have seen those collectives in Catalonia, in the liberated parts of Aragon, in Levante, in the part of Castille that was liberated from fascism! There you would have found men who were enthusiastic and confident, who did not aspire to occupy a high government position, who did not spend their time thinking of ways to live at the expense of the State; men whose concerns were sowing and harvesting; men who relied on their own labor and dedication for everything; men who loved the earth the way one loves one’s mother or one’s wife.

In contact with these trailblazers of a new era, one forgot many sorrows, the depressed spirit was refreshed, and one was able to face with more confidence and more security the work that was being done for the future.

To get an idea of the extent of this movement of collectivization of the land, we shall provide some data from the Congress of Peasant Collectives of Aragon, held in Caspe in mid-February 1937. What follows is the summary of the register of county organizations represented at the Congress:

• County of Alcañiz (collectives from six villages, Alcañiz, Castelserau, Belmonte, La Cordoñera, Torrecilla de Alcañiz, Valdeagorda) with 596 members.

• County of Alcoriza: 13 collectives, some, like those of Andorra and Cañizar del Olivar, with 3,200 members each, and that of Alcoriza with a thousand. A total of 10,000 members.

• County of Albalate de Cinca: 16 collectives, the largest of which, that of Ontiñena, had 800 members, while the smallest, that of Almidafa, had 30. Total: 4,068 members.

• County of Angües: 36 collectives with 6,021 members; the largest was that of Casdás, with 406 members, the smallest, that of Sietamo, with 45.

• County of Caspe: 5 collectives, the largest being that of Maella with 757 members. Total: 2,197 members.

• County of Ejulve: 8 collectives, the largest, that of Villarluengo with 1,300 members, and Ejulve with 1,200 members; the smallest was in Mezquita de Jarque, with 27 members. Total: 3,807 members.

• County of Escucha: 6 collectives, the largest in Utrilla, with 400 members.

• County of Grañen: 12 collectives (there are no figures for each individual collective).

• County of Lecera: 9 collectives with 2,045 members; the largest, Lecera, had 650 members, while the smallest, Moneva, had 77.

• County of Monzón: 35 collectives, including the collective of Binefar with 3,400 members and the collective of Binacet with 1,800.

• County of Sastago: 4 collectives, with a total of 478 members.

• County of Puebla de Hijar: 9 collectives with a total of 7,146 members.

• County of Pina de Ebro: 6 collectives with 2,924 members.

• County of Torrente: 3 collectives.

• County of Valderrobres: 18 collectives with 11,449 members; some of them were very large, like that of Fresneda, with 2,000 members, that of Calaceite with 1,740, the collective of Valderrobres, with 1,600, and the collective of Mazaleón, with 1,560.

• County of Mas de las Matas: 14 collectives, with 7,930 members; three of these collectives had more than 1,000 members each.

• County of Muniesa: 11 collectives with 2,254 members.

• County of Mora de Rubielos: 21 collectives with 3,782 members.

• County of Ainsa: no statistics available for the numbers of collectives or their membership.

• County of Alfambra: 6 collectives with 502 members.

• County of Benabarre: 6 collectives with 470 members.

• County of Barbastro: 31 collectives with 7,983 members; the most important of which was that of Peralta de Alcolea, with 1,000 members.

• County of Pancrudo: 4 collectives with 215 members.

Delegates from 275 agrarian collectives attended the Caspe Congress, representing collectives from 23 counties in Aragon with a total of 141,430 members. It must be noted, however, that this figure only counts heads of families. More than 70% of the peasant population of Aragon was associated in the agrarian collectives. The purpose of the Caspe Congress was to form a regional federation of these collectives and to draft some general lines of conduct and goals. The federation’s purpose was, according to the resolutions adopted by the Congress, “to coordinate the economic potential of the region and to provide fraternal advice to the collectives with respect to the autonomously-established and federative rules that serve us as guidelines.”

The collectives were supposed to generate accurate statistics on their production and consumption, and send these statistics to their respective county committees, which would then transmit them to the Regional Committee; these statistical reports would be the “only way to establish real human solidarity”.

This is how the peasants of Aragon planned to organize their resources:

1. Proceed with all urgency to the creation of experimental farms in all the collectives of Aragon in order to undertake the research that is believed to be necessary to introduce new varieties of crops and to thus obtain improved yields and to increase agricultural production throughout the entire region. At the same time, each collective must set aside a parcel of land, no matter how small, for research concerning the kinds of trees that would be most productive and best adapted to the soil of each locality.

2. Farms for the production of seeds must also be established; for this purpose, Aragon can be divided into three large zones and in each of them large tracts of land should be set aside for the production of the seeds that are needed in each zone, and, in the right seasons, to produce seeds for other collectives, even if they do not belong to the same zone. Take the cultivation of potatoes, for example: the seeds of this plant must be produced in the zone of Aragon which has the highest mean elevation above sea level, so that these seeds may be planted by the collectives in the other zones, since the above-ground parts of this plant are not attacked by the diseases that characteristically afflict them if we always produce and cultivate them in lowlands, that is, in humid and hot regions.

These three zones will proceed to exchange the seeds that may be required in each case, according to the results of the research projects conducted on the experimental farms, since the work of these farms must be coordinated and audited by agronomists for scientific review, and so that these results will lead to experiments believed to be necessary and beneficial….

The following are some of the resolutions approved at the Caspe Congress of the Federation of Collectives:

Intensive propaganda in favor of the advantages of collectivism, emphasizing its basis in mutual aid.

Control the experimental farms that should be created in every locality where the conditions of the terrain are favorable for the production of all kinds of seeds.

Help guide young people who have a predisposition for technical training by creating technical schools that would be devoted to this particular task.

Organize a team of technicians to perform a study in Aragon to determine the best ways to obtain the greatest yields in the various kinds of work conducted in the countryside.

To provide the collectives with all the elements they need to grow which, at the same time that they entertain their members, they also help raise the general cultural level of the individual.

To organize conferences to raise the intellectual level of the peasants and to accustom them to the new situation.

To use every means to encourage arboriculture.

The construction of livestock farms in every collective to carry out research and to select the various breeds and varieties of the existing livestock and to preserve those that have shown the greatest yields.

To construct, where circumstances allow, large model farms, with all the advances of modern science, in order to obtain improved yields and to make the results available to all collectives.

The livestock research farms must be directed by technical elements so that their research will benefit from the latest scientific discoveries.

The same concern, the same aspirations, the same understanding of what had to be done, may be observed in the resolutions of all the peasants’ congresses at the county, regional and national level, that were held during the years of revolution and war.

This is how the Congress of Caspe resolved to deal with problem of those who were either reluctant to join the collectives or opposed to them, and how it separated them from the collectives:

1. Small landowners, when they voluntarily leave the collectives, insofar as they consider themselves capable of conducting their operations without the help of others, will thereby forfeit the right to receive any of the earnings of the collectives. Notwithstanding this stricture, their enterprises will be respected as long as they are not detrimental to collective interests.

2. The rural estates and urban mansions and other goods of the rebel elements that have been confiscated, will be placed at the usufructuary disposal of the working class organizations that existed at the time of their confiscation, as long as these organizations accept the existence of the collectives.

3. All private land that was farmed by sharecroppers or tenant farmers will pass into the hands of the collectives.

4. No individual landowner will be allowed to farm more land than he can cultivate with his own physical labor, and the individual landowner is absolutely prohibited from hiring wage laborers.

The regional peasants’ federations of Aragon, Catalonia, Levante, the Center, and Andalusia formed a National Peasants’ Federation to coordinate, on a national level, all the initiatives, information, reports and interests of all peasants who were members of its affiliated collectives—which had more than 1,500,000 members at the end of the war—during the first months of 1939.

The collectives of Aragon were destroyed by communist troops in a disgusting, hateful rampage. They had been eliminated for only a short time when they had to be authorized to reorganize in exactly the same form and with the same policies as before. And when Spain finally wants to solve its agrarian problem, it will have to return to the course marked out by the peasants themselves between July 1936 and early 1939.

International socialism, born during the heyday of the concentration of industry, never understood the soul of the peasant. The industrial worker did not love either his tools or his factory. He switches from one factory and from one job to another without hardly batting an eye. He does not feel intimately engaged in his labor. Most of the time, he is not even aware of the purpose of his labor, although this sentiment was no longer characteristic of the attitude that prevailed in the collectivized factories, in the enterprises founded by our trade unions, where the workers were conscious of the sense of collective ownership. The peasant, on the other hand, loves the soil he cultivates; and because he loves it, he wants it for himself. The supreme illusion of the peasant who works on land owned by someone else, the situation of the tenant farmer, rabassaire, sharecropper, etc., is the desire to own that land, not because he wants to speculate on its price on the capitalist real estate market, and not because he wants to get rich, but because that land is part of his personality and he loves it just as much as he loves himself, his wife and his children.

It would be a salutary development if the concept of ownership were to be interpreted in a very different sense, because the private ownership of the land is an obstacle to progress and justice and does not even benefit, as such, the small landowners themselves who cultivate their land at the price of immense sacrifices. This transformation cannot be carried out in 24 hours; it requires a period of gestation and development.

This process could only be accelerated by the living example of the agrarian collectives. It would be a mistake to attempt to arbitrarily skip this stage of transformation of the concepts of property, by means of decrees or by means of terror.

It is not the peasant’s fault, forgotten on his little plot of land in the country, that he is so passionately devoted to the idea of owning the land he cultivates. Besides being a natural response, it is also the product of a legacy that we have done nothing to counteract with the light of culture.

It is our personal opinion that, with the agrarian collectives, we were proceeding in the right direction with regard to our policies affecting the countryside. That is why we were not impatient with their development, because when you are going in the right direction and working with confidence, you always reach your goal.

Our collectives were not like the old medieval monasteries of the religious orders. They did not isolate themselves, but always closely bound their very existence, their interests and aspirations, with those of the peasant masses, while they simultaneously forged similar bonds with the industries of the cities.

Although we are advocates of the collective cultivation of the land, without the use of any violence at all for the purpose of forcing the reluctant or those who do not understand them to join the collectives, we must not forget one thing: the experience of every country, especially those where agriculture is most intensive, shows that the productivity of land that is cultivated by the family unit is not lower than that of land that is cultivated in common by a collective. From the point of view of yields, the existence of the family farm, so deeply rooted in the peasants, is perfectly tolerable. What is more important here is specialization. It is not advisable for a peasant or an agrarian collective to be devoted to all kinds of crops. They should specialize in a particular kind of production and achieve the greatest improvements in the sector they have chosen.

The greatest disadvantage of the family farm, which absorbs the labor of all the members of the family, the father, the mother, the children, the grandparents, is that it demands too much work. Under these conditions, the peasant has no other concern than the land, sowing, weeding, harvest, etc. There are no fixed hours of labor, there is no limit to his physical exhaustion. He is able to obtain from his land, at least during the first few years, proportionally greater yields per worker than would be produced by any single member of the collectives. The peasant, however, should not push his sacrifice, and that of his children, to the extremes. He needs some time left over after work, a reserve of energy to learn, and to teach his family, so that the light of civilization may shine in his home, too.

Work performed in the collectives is more easy-going and allows its members to read newspapers, magazines and books, and also to cultivate their minds and to open them up to the fresh air of progressive innovations.

It is because of this right and this duty to relax, and not to exhaust oneself entirely, stooped over the soil from sunrise to sundown, and because of other things besides, that the regime of collective labor is superior and must be encouraged, especially after the awe-inspiring Spanish experience. However, as long as the peasants do not arrive at this understanding voluntarily, as long as they are not convinced by the force of example, family farms and small-scale agricultural enterprises that do not require outside labor power will continue to exist and must be respected.

The revolution, however, if it is a real revolution, is never just restricted to a single sector. It is a total process that embraces everything and affects everything.

Inspired by the tradition of spiritual and educational renewal that was so brilliantly expressed in the work of Francisco Ferrer and those who followed in his footsteps, the Council of the Unified New School [Consejo de la Escuela Nueva Unificada—CENU] was formed during the first days of the movement, by a Decree issued on July 27, 1936, in which all the political and social tendencies that shared common ground with regard to their understanding of the problems relating to education and children also participated.

The CENU bore precious fruit, carrying out in a few months a project that the republic was not able to implement during the five years of its existence.

As of July 19, 1936, 34,000 children attended the official schools of Barcelona; after five months of the revolutionary movement, this number had risen to 54,758. Schools were created at an unprecedented rate. The number of elementary and secondary school students in Catalonia almost tripled, not to mention the improvements made with respect to the curriculum and methods of teaching.

Amid this feverish burst of creation on the military, economic and cultural fronts, not all was satisfaction and happiness; there was also much sorrow and bitterness. The partisan politics of parties and organizations was gradually driving wedges among the people of Catalonia and transforming them into members of enemy factions.

We wanted to unite Catalonia in the war effort and to make victory the foundation of all future construction, but this also implied that there should be no arbitrary hold-outs or shirkers, since, for example, the reorganization of the management of the economy and its restructuring to obtain the maximum yield were also preconditions for victory. Every kind of greed and lust for power came to the surface. A morbid sinecurism made its appearance. We managed a department of the Government of the Generalitat, with 250 civil servants; of this figure, to be perfectly honest, half were superfluous. Our successors, who certainly never thought much along constructive lines, and who did not strive for the implementation of any new initiatives, raised the number of civil servants in this department to more than 900.

The front was too far away, thanks to our timely haste in containing any rebel attack, and the roar of the artillery and the pain and misery of the trenches did not disturb the digestion of those fortunate enough to be far from the front lines. Every sector was a hotbed of political maneuvering, and the divorce between the needs of the front and the appetites of the rearguard became increasingly more evident, and the distance between them ever greater. When the policies and the corrupt and demoralizing example of the central government made their appearance in Catalonia, the defects that we called attention to during the early period in the rearguard multiplied and intensified in a most appalling manner.