A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (68 page)

The military had expected to take power in a matter of hours. The cowardice and confusion of the Popular Front republican politicians gave them their chance. What upset their calculations was the reaction of workers. The UGT and CNT unions called for a general strike. But workers did not simply engage in passive stoppages. In most of the cities and towns of mainland Spain they moved to seize control of the barracks and disarm the army. Militants from the CNT, UGT and workers’ parties grabbed guns from wherever they could. Sometimes they succeeded in winning over sections of the generally pro-republican Assault Guard and even, as in Barcelona, the traditionally anti working class Civil Guard. But what mattered was their initiative. Where they moved decisively, without vacillation or conciliation towards the right wing officers, they were nearly always successful.

The coup’s successes were mostly in cities where workers’ leaders accepted claims by officers to support the republic. In places like Seville, Cádiz, Saragossa and Oviedo these officers waited until the armed workers had dispersed before declaring for the coup and shooting down anyone who resisted.
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Such was the price workers paid for having faith in those sections of the traditional ruling elite who claimed to be ‘republicans’. It was only because this faith was not universal that Franco’s forces won control of less than half of Spain in July 1936 rather than the whole country.

In places where the rising was crushed it was not only Franco’s followers who suffered defeat: ‘The state, caught between its insurgent army and the armed masses of the people, had shattered to pieces’.
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Although the official government still held office in Madrid, real authority in the localities was in the hands of a multitude of revolutionary committees. The workers who held power in an area used it in their own interests: factories were taken over and collectivised; peasants began to divide the land, knowing that the workers’ militias would protect them; armed workers arrested local dignitaries with a record of hostility to their demands. With the disintegration of the army, the bourgeoisie seemed finished throughout most of the republican areas, hence the conditions Orwell found in Barcelona. Effective power was in the hands of the workers’ organisations, while the official republican government held office without effective power. This was also true of the autonomous government of Catalonia, the most important industrial region. Its president, Companys, invited the leaders of the most powerful workers’ organisation in Catalonia, the CNT, to a meeting at which he told them:

A situation of ‘dual power’ existed—as in the Russian Revolution of 1917 and at points during the German Revolution of 1918-20—with the official government dependent on networks of revolutionary committees and organisations to get things done. However, the republican government did have one advantage over the revolutionary committees. It had a centralised structure and they did not. This was a vital matter. The fascist armies were centralised and so able to pursue a single strategy across the whole country. The anti-fascists needed to be centralised as well, otherwise the fascists would be able to win the war simply by moving their troops to points on the front where the opposing forces were weakest, knowing the anti-fascists would not be able to respond by concentrating their forces.

This anti-fascist centralisation could have been achieved by drawing the committees together. There were coordinating committees of anti-fascist militias in many localities. But there was no establishment of an all-Spanish committee of militias and workers’ delegates comparable to the Russian soviets of 1917.

The reason for this failing lay in the politics of the workers’ organisations. The most powerful, the anarcho-syndicalists, had always insisted that any centralisation of power would involve a crushing of the workers by a new state. It would be wrong to follow this path now, they said. In the words of one of their leaders, Santillan, ‘Dictatorship was the liquidation of libertarian communism, which could only be achieved by the liberty and spontaneity of the masses’.
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Rather than go along that path, they argued to leave Companys’s government intact and collaborate with it. Even the ablest and most militant of the CNT leaders, Buenaventura Durutti—who had been involved in two unsuccessful risings against republican governments—did not dispute this logic. He had played a decisive role in crushing the fascists in Barcelona, was the hero of the city’s workers, and was to lead an impromptu workers’ army of tens of thousands which swept across the Catalan border into Aragon and towards the fascist-held city of Saragossa. But he was not prepared to confront the question of power, and left his CNT colleagues free to share it with Companys’s bourgeois government.

The Catalan CNT did create a partial ‘counter-power’ to the government. It formed a central militia committee made up of representatives from itself, the UGT union, the Socialist Party, the Communist Party, the dissident communist POUM party, the Rabassaires peasant organisation and Companys’s party. This coordinated the military struggle in the region and was the focus for workers’ aspirations. But as it was made up of parties rather than workers’, soldiers’ and peasants’ delegates it was an imperfect expression of those aspirations. And it consciously left decisions over other important questions, particularly finance and the banks, with Companys’s government.

The Socialist Party and UGT leaders were the main influence on the workers’ movement in Madrid, and the armed militia owing allegiance to them was soon as much in control of that city as the CNT was in Barcelona. But for all the talk of Caballero being the ‘Spanish Lenin’, his supporters made no moves to establish a structure of workers’ power. The entire history of their organisation had involved working to exert pressure within the institutions of existing society. They were terrified of any elected delegate structure which might allow the anarchists to exert pressure on the rank and file of their own organisations. The right inside the Socialist Party urged immediate compromise with the bourgeois republicans. The left, led by Caballero, were not happy about this, remembering how unsuccessful their past collaborations with the republicans had been. But the left had no other answer to the question of how to create a centralised authority to counter the fascist armies’ coordinated pincer movement towards Madrid.

The Communist Party had been founded a decade and a half earlier to counter the lack of politics of the anarcho-syndicalists and the reformism of the Socialist Party. But successive expulsions had driven from the party any leaders who might question the line coming from Stalin in Moscow. And that line was now to promote a Popular Front with the bourgeois republicans. While the CNT and the Socialist Party left dithered about what to do about the government, the Communist Party and the Russian ambassador urged them to join a coalition government, abjure talk of revolution and restrict themselves to purely republican anti-fascist policies. They argued this would win the support of the middle classes, stop other capitalists and landowners going over to the fascists, and be looked on favourably by the French and British governments. It would also be able to unite the members of the various militias into a single, centralised army under the command of those professional officers who had stuck by the republic.

Such a government was eventually formed at the beginning of September. Caballero was prime minister, but the majority of its members were republicans or right wing socialists. Its slogan was, ‘First win the war, then talk about the revolution.’ It was an approach the CNT leaders could not resist for much longer than the left Socialists. Soon three of them had joined Companys’s government in Catalonia, to be followed by four taking ministerial posts in Madrid.

The left Socialists and anarcho-syndicalists believed that by postponing completion of the revolution they would be able both to hang on to the gains workers had already made and win the war by cementing the support of the moderate republicans. But this was just not possible. What the moderate republicans wanted most of all was respect for private property and the maintenance, without any revolutionary tampering, of those sections of the state machine which remained on the side of the republic. They saw rebuilding the prestige of the ‘republican’ army officers and police chiefs as their ultimate protection against social revolution.

However, respect for private property and maintenance of the old state machine in Spain in the autumn of 1936 did not mean merely restraining workers from struggle. It meant somehow—by persuasion or force—making workers surrender the gains they had made and give up control of the factories and estates they had taken over in July. It meant taking arms away from the workers who had stormed the barracks in July and handing them back to officers who had sat on the fence.

The Communist Party functionaries and right wing Socialists argued that any attempts by workers to make social revolution would mean a second civil war within the republican side. Yet their efforts to force workers to abandon their social conquests created precisely the elements of such a civil war.

It was they, not the anarchists or the extreme left POUM, who withdrew soldiers and arms from the front for internal use. It was they who initiated fighting when workers refused to leave collectivised property or obey the orders of the refurbished bourgeois state. It was they who began armed clashes that cost hundreds of lives in Barcelona in May 1937, when they insisted on trying to seize the city telephone building that the CNT militia had conquered from the fascists nine and a half months earlier. And it was they who unleashed police terror against the left which involved the murder of leaders like Andrés Nin and the imprisonment of thousands of anti-fascist militants. There was no other way a militant working class could be forced to abandon its revolution and wait for ‘the end of the war’.

Yet the sacrifices imposed on workers did not win the war, any more than those imposed by social democratic governments in Germany, Austria or France stopped the advance of fascism. Every concession made to the bourgeois parties in republican Spain played into Franco’s hands.

A typical pattern developed when the republican towns were hard-pressed. The workers, who had everything to lose by Franco taking the towns, were prepared to fight to the end. But the propertied middle classes, if they did not positively welcome the fascist victory, believed they could arrange a compromise for themselves. Thus when the Basque bourgeoisie abandoned San Sebastian, it ensured militants belonging to the CNT could not continue the struggle. It waged a civil war within a civil war, shooting ‘looters’ and ‘incendiaries’ to protect property, and leaving armed guards patrolling the streets to ensure the city was handed over intact to Franco. The same pattern was repeated in Bilbao, Santander and Gijon.
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Elsewhere, officers who had been promoted to positions of command by the government went over to the fascists at key moments. In the last days of the war a junta of republican generals seized power in Madrid with the hope of discussing a ‘peaceful surrender’ with Franco, and 2,000 died in the fighting.

The concessions to bourgeois respectability took their toll in other ways. Almost the whole of the Spanish fleet had imprisoned its officers and opposed the fascist uprising in July 1936. This presented a difficult obstacle to Franco, who was attempting to move the bulk of his army from Morocco to the Spanish mainland. But, in pursuit of Anglo-French support, the governments of Giral and Caballero ordered the fleet away from Tangiers and ended its interference with Franco’s lines of communication. The same reasoning prevented any attempt to foment rebellion behind Franco’s lines by giving a guarantee of independence to Morocco. The Spanish army had been battered by anti-colonial risings in the 1920s and the chances of forging a new struggle were high. Instead the Popular Front governments preferred to seek Anglo-French favour by offering those powers concessions in a Spanish-ruled Morocco.

Yet the attempts to placate the Great Powers achieved nothing. Britain and France refused to supply the republic with arms, even though Germany and Italy were giving massive backing to Franco.

The search for respectability also meant the republic had little to offer the small peasants who had misguidedly volunteered to fight for Franco and the large numbers of workers stranded in his zone, including those in traditionally militant places such as Seville, Oviedo and Saragossa. One of the most astonishing features of the war was how little trouble Franco faced from the populations he had subdued—a marked contrast to what had happened behind the front lines of the White armies in the Russian civil war.

The most energetic force on the left pushing the anti-revolutionary policy was the Communist Party. Its core membership did not do this out of a desire to advance in existing society, even if the party did recruit large numbers of middle class people who were motivated in this way. The core was made up of dedicated and courageous people who identified with Russia and accepted the Stalinist argument that it was ‘impractical’ to push for revolution. So, while opposing revolutionary demands, they fought with revolutionary enthusiasm in defence of Madrid in the autumn of 1936, using the language of class to mobilise workers. But the enthusiasm and the language were still tied to a policy as fatal as that followed by social democrats elsewhere in Europe. By crushing the revolution in its stronghold, Barcelona, in May 1937 they also made it much more difficult to fight fascism. They paid the price when Franco was able to march unopposed into Barcelona in January 1939 and the republican generals turned against the Communists in Madrid a few weeks later.

There are those who question the use of the term ‘fascist’ to describe Franco’s forces. Even Eric Hobsbawm claims, ‘General Franco cannot…be described as a fascist.’ They focus on the difference between his ‘movement’ and the Italian fascists and German Nazis. The attempt to create a totalitarian mass party along fascist lines, the Falange, was only one component, they point out. The movement also comprised old style monarchists, generals who merely wanted the kind of coup (
pronunciamento
) which had been common in the previous century, conservative landowners, devotees of the church, and the ‘Carlist’ small farmers of Navarre whose ideals harked back to the days of the Inquisition.