The Spanish Civil War (12 page)

Spanish agriculture had been, for several generations, the object of debate, as was understandable since it was still the main source of wealth in the country. It accounted for about two-fifths of the Spanish national income in the 1930s though most labourers’ wages did not bring them enough to buy their food. Still, well over half the population lived from the land. Agrarian reform had been discussed since the eighteenth century but, along with many other good ideas suggested by the enlightened ministers of King Charles III, little had come of it. The economist Joaquín Costa, a member of the famous Generation of ’98, had argued that irrigation, internal colonization and a collective approach might work wonders. With much unrest on the land, those things seemed to be desirable, but, apart from the setting up of a few technical schools, little was done. Yet the subject was extensively discussed and several laws for, at least, the improvement of agriculture were introduced, and usually cut to pieces in the Cortes.
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In the 1930s, the land was characterized by three main problems: first, the problems of the tiny farms, or
minifundia,
which could not give their owners an adequate living, and which were often much split up. These farms existed specially in rainy Galicia, but were also to be found elsewhere in northern Spain: while Soria, in Castile, had some of the most extreme examples. Second, there were also many large estates,
latifundia,
often owned by absentees, farmed negligently, and sometimes giving the owners or their representatives a dominant economic position in the locality. The characteristic land of
latifundia
was western Andalusia and Estremadura, beautiful and mountainous if rough and stony. Third, there were problems arising from different sorts of tenancies. Most of Castile, for example, was an area of poor tenant farmers insecure from a variety of reasons. In other regions, such as the Basque country, the Levante, and the Cantabrian coast, farms were often prosperous, being well irrigated; they presented no social problem, since they employed only a few people apart from the family of the farmer.

The problem of the
latifundia
seemed the most severe one in Spain. Accurate statistics on this matter are difficult to find. Though the church since the nineteenth century had ceased to be a large proprietor, the nobility continued to be: noble property constituted a quarter of the land in Toledo, an eighth in Cáceres, while perhaps 6 per cent of cultivated land as a whole was in the hands of families of title. Old families, such as those of the Duques de Medinaceli, Peñaranda, Villa-hermosa, or Alba, all owned estates of more than 75,000 acres. Nevertheless, most great estates belonged to the bourgeoisie, rather than to the nobility. It is difficult, because of the duplication of holdings and the combination of families, to know quite how important the
latifundia
were in the economy, but over half of cultivable Spain was owned by people whose holdings exceeded the, by Spanish standards, quite large farm of 250 acres. On these estates, the cultivation of traditional crops (particularly olives and wine) was usually pursued, and promising new ones (cotton, rice, wheat) often neglected, for lack of capital investment. Fertilizers, irrigation and mechanization were also ignored and much land (though little fertile land, probably) left uncultivated. Many such estates, it is true, were let at high prices. But all who worked on these farms lived in the large white dormitory towns of the south and west, and were hired, or not, as the case might be, by the proprietor’s agent at dawn and paid an insignificant wage (3.50 pesetas a day, say) except at harvest.
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Labour was twice as great as demand. The annually increasing population could be absorbed by new industry neither in Madrid nor in Catalonia—nor by emigration to the Americas (that possibility ceased after 1930). Unemployment was, therefore, rife: the average year’s work in Andalusia was between 180 to 250 days a year, often 130. Wages during the harvest were close to the average in towns, but local workers then found themselves in competition with migrant, or even Portuguese, workers. There was always new labour to be brought in, and the only strikes which could begin to have any effect were those mounted during the harvest, and many conscientious workers would shrink from anything so destructive.

The landless labourers of the Spanish south were, however, the most potentially revolutionary group in the country. Their conditions
had worsened in the hundred years since the disentailment of the church’s lands. A hundred small alleviations available in the old inefficient ‘feudal’ system had vanished with modern capitalist farming—from the possibility of gleaning, to the availability of common lands for grazing and the collection of firewood. Few landless labourers even had gardens. Thus peasants responded to the appeal of anarchism, and most Andalusian and Estremaduran agricultural workers were either entirely or partially anarchists by, say, 1920. The socialists were beginning to make headway in these areas too. The labourers concerned had no tenure and, being underemployed if not unemployed, were easily accessible to revolutionary propaganda: and once it became known that so-and-so was an anarchist, his chances of getting back to a job were correspondingly less.

There were also problems for small owners. Most of those whose estates seemed to be tiny—over three-quarters of smallholdings (that is, those under 25 acres) were under one and a quarter acres—were often gardeners growing potatoes who had other jobs as fishermen, migrant workers or day labourers. In the 1930s, pressure on these farmers was the greater because the old outlet of emigration to the Americas, particularly important in Galicia or Asturias, had stopped. As for tenant farmers proper, few had their leases fixed by a written agreement and, if they did, it was for a short time. Tenants could not pass on their farms as of right to their sons; and, if the estate were sold, or the owner died, the new proprietor could renounce existing leases. Many tenant farmers were in debt to moneylenders. Then there was the problem of the ‘
rabassaires
’ of Catalonia (from
rabassa morte,
dead vine, in Catalan). These were farmers who had grown vines on the edge of certain large estates, and held them until the vine was dead: in the past, usually fifty or sixty years. The wine disease of phylloxera in the late nineteenth century caused new vines to be planted, with shorter lives, of twenty-five years. The
rabassaires
were trying to secure ownership of the land concerned. During the republic, their position would become more radical. Apart from them, few sharecroppers, tenant farmers, or private farmers joined revolutionary parties. All were conscious of their status, which they regarded as above that of a mere worker.

The socialists had been interesting themselves in agricultural questions since the early 1920s. An ‘agricultural secretariat’ in the UGT had been founded in 1927. Their plans included a general agrarian re
form, comparable to that of Mexico, or of east Europe after 1919, to be passed by the Cortes after due consultation of experts and analyses on the spot. Their ideas were those introduced as decrees by Largo Caballero as minister of labour, in May 1931. Henceforth, tenant farmers could only be evicted if they had not paid rent or had not cultivated land. Tenants who gave up their leases were to be paid by the landlords for improvements, if any. Tenants could get their rents reduced in the event of a bad harvest, or if the rent exceeded the income of the farm. Collective approaches, from groups of farmers, were to be favoured in applications for leases (the socialists desired to encourage collectivization, though not to force it on the unwilling). An eight-hour day would be normal, permitting overtime pay for extra work. Mixed arbitration boards, or ‘juries’, of landowner and peasant would decide wage disputes: a chairman would either be elected or, if there were no agreement, he would be appointed by the (for the moment, socialist) minister of labour. The law of
Términos municipales,
municipal boundaries, meant that employers had to offer jobs to people of the town concerned before making offers to outsiders; and a law entitled
Laboreo forzoso,
obligatory labour, caused landowners to farm their estates in the ‘traditional’ manner of the region—that is, they could not turn over to something new in order to thwart, or out-manoeuvre, labourers, so as to keep wages down.

Of these, the law of
Términos municipales
had a decisive effect in removing the proprietor’s freedom of action to hire whom he wanted and to go outside the village in order to defeat a local strike. But the decree adversely affected migrant workers. Its effect was to prevent a further drift of labour to the cities and did nothing to encourage the investment in the land which alone could have created more work there.
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Nevertheless, agricultural workers were impressed. No matter that their expectations were extravagantly aroused so as to hope that the eventual agrarian reform would give real power to the poor. No matter that the decrees on leases overworked the courts. Workers began to join the agricultural section of the UGT, the FNTT (Federación Nacional de Trabajadores de la Tierra), in such numbers that, by 1932, there were some 450,000 socialist, mostly landless, farm workers, now outnumbering the anarchists on the land for the first time. Furthermore, these
workers constituted half the members of the UGT, whose character, therefore, was changing: instead of a city-based union of the traditional proletariat, practical and disciplined, in the next year or two it became partly, at least, millenarian and irregular, in expectation and style. Meantime, the new decrees had another effect, by paving the way for higher wages: earnings doubled between 1931 and 1933, in consequence of Largo’s mixed arbitration boards’ decisions.

Work began too on an agrarian reform proper. The first plan, which had the advantages of simplicity, efficacy and political practicability, sought to resettle 60–75,000 landless labourers a year on land ‘temporarily’ sequestered from the largest proprietors, the whole to be paid for by a surtax on all large landowners. This scheme was too modest for the socialist party, and too extreme for the radicals. Alcalá Zamora introduced a scheme of his own, as did a Cortes committee on agriculture. All these plans were rejected. Finally, in March 1932, Marcelino Domingo, Azaña’s well-intentioned but ignorant new minister of agriculture, put forward a plan of great complexity. About half the surface of Spain was technically to be regarded as expropriatable, even if only a small amount was to be taken over to begin with. Peasants were to be settled either as individual farmers, or as members of a collective, according to the vote of the municipality concerned. All land taken over would be compensated for, except for the lands of grandees or others who had established their estates in the nineteenth century by foreclosing as private farms what had formally been theirs merely to administer under feudal arrangements abolished in 1811. Landless workers were to be at the head of the list of those who desired to go as settlers on new land, but private farmers could also apply. Settlers could not sell, mortgage or lease the land that they obtained: the state would be the new proprietor. An Institute of Agrarian Reform was set up to administer these arrangements, and to inspire technical education, investment and irrigation.

Property to be taken over was, first, owned by a single person in a single municipality above a certain maximum, that maximum to vary according to crop (grain, 730 acres; uncultivated land, 1,600 acres; vineyards, 360 acres). Second, land near the municipality was expropriatable if it were not cultivated, and if the owner also had more than 1,000 pesetas’ worth of land in that same township. ‘Feudal’ lands (with signorial jurisdiction), badly cultivated lands, lands that could be
irrigated and were not, and continuously leased lands could also be seized. Only the lands of grandees of Spain—the highest rank of nobility—were affected on a national, not a municipal, basis, in the sense that these noblemen were limited to a maximum holding regardless of where it was.

All these provisions were hedged in by qualifications, so that, in the end, except for grandees, the properties of great landowners were not affected much if they were widely spread. Why, it was quite fairly demanded, should grandees be treated in one way and
nouveaux riches
in another? Forest and pasture were also exempted. The laws worried farmers without transforming the basis of agriculture. Largo Caballero said that the law was ‘an aspirin to cure an appendicitis’.

The agrarian politicians, led by the Carlist José María Lamamié de Clairac, attacked the law day after day in the Cortes, with great perseverance. Then the republicans, including Azaña and even the minister, Marcelino Domingo, neglected to attend many of the debates on the agrarian law. Their first concerns were the church, the Catalan question, a free press, and a good educational system. Their knowledge of economic matters was as modest as their interest. Hence the law, though finally passed, was changed during its discussion, and many doubts were raised about it, these being shared by several of its sponsors. The debates alternated in the summer of 1932 with those on the statute of Catalan autonomy. When the Agrarian Law was finally passed, there was no urgency to put it into effect. The minister seemed still to regret his time at the ministry of education. Yet great hopes had been aroused among agricultural workers. These expectations would soon turn sour when thwarted. Agrarian reform had become in Spain, as elsewhere, a myth. Like the phrase ‘general strike’, or the words ‘liberty’ or ‘revolution’, it seemed a programme in itself, regardless of the fact that big and small farms have as different problems as wet and dry regions. Something could be done to alleviate the misery of agricultural life in Spain by legislation and investment but since water control, drainage, irrigation, and the provision of chemical fertilizers are all dependent upon investment and industry, the only real solution to the agrarian problem was to find a way to reduce the population on the land by encouraging industry.