Anarchism and Workers' Self-Management in Revolutionary Spain. Frank Mintz
for and alongside the victims of exploitation in the Maghreb. Ángel Pestaña was alone in raising the issue at the 1931 congress, although he did not table a motion through his trade union.29
The upshot of the First World War was that Spanish industry serviced the belligerents, and that exploitation of wage-earners surged as a result. In August 1917, the CNT and UGT made contact with each other and decided to mount a revolutionary general strike together. It failed, thanks to the chicanery of the socialists, summarised thus in the Spanish Cortes by Indalecio Prieto: “Sure, we gave weapons to the People. But it is also true that we did not give them ammunition”.30 In order to foment and orchestrate future labor disputes, the CNT espoused the sindicato único format.
The efficacy of the new format was borne out in 1919. Catalonia’s power company, La Canadiense, was brought to a standstill by a strike mounted in solidarity with eight bookkeeper employees (over their being taken on as permanent staff at a lower rate of pay).31 That solidarity then spread to many power plants and textile plants. The government declared a state of emergency in Catalonia and conscripted the workers who nevertheless refused to return to work. Their demands were for a pay increase, an eight-hour working day and half pay for days spent on strike. That strike began in January at La Canadiense and by the end of February it affected the whole of Catalonia. The strike dragged on into March, and between 24 March and 7 April there was a general strike in place. On 14 April, the employers’ union caved in to all of the demands, including the release of 3,000 arrested workers. Some 100,000 workers had taken part in the strike in Catalonia.
That strike, entirely the handiwork of the CNT, is an example of that organisation’s effectiveness; that year its membership numbered 755,000, which is to say, nearly 10 percent of the working population. In Catalonia alone, the CNT had 252,000 members by 1920, whereas the UGT had 211,000 in the whole of Spain.
In 1922, a CNT delegation was dispatched to the launch of the Third International in Moscow, and decided not to affiliate to the new International in light of the situation of anarchists and the Russian workers. Two Marxists in the delegation—Andrés Nin and Joaquín Maurín—then quit the CNT, and went on to launch the POUM.32
But more serious developments were afoot: the Catalan employers, out for revenge over the La Canadiense strike, armed men who gunned down trade union officers, including the man who had been the inspiration behind the strike tactics—Salvador Seguí. This was the era of pistolerismo (pitting the ‘hired killers’ against the syndicalists). In response, the defense groups were formed. There was all-out struggle between 1919 and 1923.
These were the days of Mussolini and military dictatorships across Europe (Hungary, Bulgaria), and the Spanish employer class needed a strong government. General Primo de Rivera took power in 1923, and not one political group lifted a finger to oppose him. The CNT opted to disband and take its structures underground, though at a local level the unions carried on with their activities, sometimes under a different designation.
During the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, the PSOE and the UGT not only failed to oppose the regime, but actually collaborated with it. This explains why the Mussolinian model, followed in Spain, never ruled out the parliamentary road: another effort was to wipe out the CNT by means of state sponsorship of the UGT. Thus the UGT’s general secretary, Largo Caballero, was seconded to the Ministry of Labor as councillor of State. But the dictatorship had no trade union policy; the workers were not taken in. Between 1920 and 1926 the UGT stagnated, with only a slight rise in its membership from 211,000 to 219,000.
Where the cenetistas (CNT personnel) stood was something of an unknown quantity as far as their adversaries were concerned. In fact, since 1927, the CNT had been flanked by an anarchist federation, the FAI (Federación Anarquista Ibérica/Iberian Anarchist Federation, the aspiration being to embrace Portugal as well, though this was never achieved, due to the Salazar dictatorship’s repression), the aim of which was to further the spread of anarchist ideas inside the CNT and across the country.
The dictatorship failed to live up to the ambitions of the Spanish employers who did not take to Mussolini-style dirigiste economics; the left-wing political parties began to stir, and disputes took a more bitter turn. The 1930–1931 period was crucial, for the regime allowed a measure of trade union reorganisation, doubtless on account of possible tensions arising from the 1929 depression. By around 1930, the UGT membership stood at 277,000.
From the Interior minister, General Mola, and following overtures made by Pestaña, the CNT secured the right to organise. Mola went on to become the organiser of the 1936 coup d’état and, in particular, was behind the orders that left-wing leaders be executed en masse and out of hand, without trial.
This was the backdrop against which the April 1931 municipal elections were held, with a clear victory going to the republicans, whereupon a Republic was proclaimed on 14 April 1931. King Alfonso XIII was no more keen than the employers to be forced into a direct confrontation. He abdicated and left the country. Given that a left-leaning military coup had been put down harshly in December 1930, the right opted to let the left bring discredit upon itself and suffer the impact of the 1929 crash, which was already making itself felt in the land. When this failed to come about, those same forces resorted to violence in 1936.
Over and above any difficulties faced at the top of the trade unions (of which more anon) the workers unionised in their droves: the UGT grew to 1,200,000 members and the CNT to at least 800,000. With that sort of following, the CNT national committee’s secretary was officially the Confederation’s only full-time and paid officer (see the “sham pyramid” below for a more nuanced picture). In fact there were only about twenty comrades who received emoluments or wages for their work—a very small number compared with the UGT.
The CNT as a harmonious whole, and the sham pyramid
The leadership, CNT cadres and FAI cadres alike, was drawn from the ranks of the working class and moulded by anarcho-syndicalism, just as they had been from the very beginning under the First International in Spain. The 1870s had seen the emergence of Anselmo Lorenzo, Tomás González Morado (both type-setters) and the like. The creation of the CNT in 1911 brought to prominence men like Galo Díez, José Negre (railway worker) and Manuel Buenacasa (carpenter). 1916–1918 threw up militants such as Salvador Seguí (painter and decorator), Ángel Pestaña (watch-maker) and Juan Peiró (glass-blower). During the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, up popped a group that included Ricardo Sanz, Buenaventura Durruti (metalworker), Juan García Oliver, Francisco Ascaso (these last two waiters), Antonio Ortiz (carpenter), etc. Come the establishment of the Republic, in came the likes of Mariano R. Vázquez (construction worker), Cipriano Mera (bricklayer) and David Antona.… During the civil war along came José Peirats (bricklayer), the Sabaté brothers (Quico Sabaté was a plumber) and Raúl Carballeira, some of whom were to lose their lives in the struggle against Francoism between 1948 and 1960.
From 1870 to 1936 and beyond, there was an uninterrupted succession of tried and tested syndicalists, all of working-class extraction. Those seventy years of militancy and working class self-education in both city and country, from Andalusia to Asturias and Catalonia, constituted the strength of the CNT. This was a mighty strength not comparable with and utterly different from what Russia had to show.
In Russia during the nineteenth century, there had been only three flare-ups of agitation: initially, the so-called Decembrists (anti-tsarist agitators drawn from the ranks of the enlightened bourgeoisie), then the exiles drawn from that same class and converted to socialism—like Herzen and Bakunin—and finally the narodniks or Populists, the offspring of the bourgeoisie who turned to the people with social ideas that were very often entirely theoretical.
Practically speaking, workers only had the twenty-five years between 1880 and 1905 to generate their own cadres. The ensuing repression decimated the educated classes and left little scope for the emergence of a fresh crop of youngsters—up until 1917, at any rate. And of the revolutionary