Anarchism and Workers' Self-Management in Revolutionary Spain. Frank Mintz
1933 the left claimed 3,200,000 votes, 20 percent of the turn-out; in 1936 that figure rose to 4,800,000, or 35 percent—meaning an additional 1,600,000 votes. Of course, we also have to include in this figure a number of returned economic migrants—who had left as the result of the aftermath of the world depression in 1929—plus younger, newly qualifying voters and the franchise granted to women in 1931.
What might the CNT input have been? The figure of 1,000,000 votes, which was bandied about by the CNT itself, strikes me as acceptable.
The left secured a slender 1.1 percent majority with a fifty-three-seat43 margin over the right, thanks to the system of proportional representation in use. Actually, the right retained much of its enormous clout.
The most remarkable change was the strides made by the Communist Party during this period, with fourteen deputies returned as against just one in 1933. Just to review the results: the Party took 12,900 votes in Málaga in 1933; by 1936 this had risen to 52,750. The 3,000 Communist Party voters in Cádiz in 1933 soared to 97,000. Oviedo’s 16,830 swelled to 170,500 and so on. There was a baffling paradox in that the membership of the Party, according to the Party’s own sources, sat at between 17,000 and 30,000,44 and nationally the Party had taken 1,800,000 votes. The only explanation is that it raked in CNT voters, and, in fact, thirteen of its fourteen deputies came from regions where anarchists were in the majority.
This political faux pas by the cenetistas (boosting their fiercest ideological foe) can be explained by their grudges against the UGT and the PSOE.
The Popular Front got a rapturous welcome, and pressure from the people secured the much-wanted release of political prisoners. As in 1931 there were no thoroughgoing reforms announced. The police continued to open fire on workers. The government was incapable of taking effective action. Right-wing outrages proliferated, thanks to the handiwork of the Falange, a pro-Mussolini group led by José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the son of the man who had been dictator from 1923 to 1927. Tensions were running high on the left, as highlighted by the headlines in Solidaridad Obrera between 1 and 18 July 1936:
Should the UGT fail to come up with a prompt response to the cordial appeal issuing from the Extra-ordinary Congress of the CNT, the responsibility for what may ensue will fall entirely upon the heads of the socialists.45
The venture is a mighty one, especially with the trapeze-artists of the POUM on the scene. But enthusiasm on your part, plus pressure from the Confederation will steer you to victory.46 (There is a cartoon by Gallo showing hands bound with manacles bearing the initials UGT.)47
(Another Gallo cartoon shows a woman gagged—the revolutionary press—and a man carrying a hammer and sickle urging her to be quiet: behind him looms a monster marked with a swastika.)48
Enough! Only lunatics and agents provocateurs can imagine a connection between fascism and anarchism […] Let the gentlemen from the Popular Front watch their step!49
Lack of vision in fraught times and the counter-revolutionary behaviour of Spanish marxism opened the gates to fascism.50
And another Gallo cartoon, at the foot of a photograph from the CNT construction strike in Madrid, a fiefdom of the UGT: two pistols marked UGT and CNT are trained on each other with the caption: “No!”51
The army’s attempted coup d’état was the logical consequence of the republican government’s passivity. Yet the CNT had, months earlier, anticipated the course that events were going to take:
[…] Right-wing elements are ready to trigger an army revolt […] Morocco seems to be the main concentration and epicenter of the plot […] If the plotters light the fire, opposition must be taken to its ultimate consequences, and the liberal bourgeoisie and its Marxist allies must not be allowed to stem the flood of events, in the event that fascist rebellion is nipped in the bud […] Fascism versus social revolution […] Keep a watchful eye out, comrades!52
18 July 1936 marshalled all the usual enemies against a common foe (with the bourgeoisie and authoritarian left—with the odd exception—lining up against the libertarians).
13 Rosa Luxembourg, The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions, (1906).
14 Charles Gide, La coopération dans les pays latins, 1926–1927 (Paris), p. 144.
15 NEP (New Economic Policy) introduced by Lenin, freeing up individual trading, meaning the petite bourgeoisie, the Party’s economy having proven itself ineffective.
16 José Peirats, La CNT en la revolución española, Tomo 1.
17 Fernanda Romeu, Las clases trabajadoras en España (Madrid 1970), p. 40.
18 According to Según Romero Maura, “The Spanish Case” in Government and Opposition (1970).
19 Díaz del Moral, Historia de las agitaciones campesinas andaluzas—Córdoba (antecedentes para una reforma agraria) (Madrid, 1967 reprint) pp. 447–448, 170–171, 182 and 285–286. This study, which dates from 1923, was not published until 1928, due to the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera, father of the founder of the Spanish fascist party (Falange), José Primo de Rivera.
20 K. L. Maidanik, Ispanski proletariat v natsionalno-revoliutsionarioni voine (The Spanish Proletariat in the National-Revolutionary War) (Moscow 1960), p. 35.
21 Joaquín Maurín, 1964 afterword to Revolución y contrarrevolución en España (1935) (reissued, Paris 1966), pp. 242–244.
22 Galo Díez, Esencia ideológica del anarcosindicalismo (Gijón 1922), pp. 10, 38. The italics are mine.
23 Artículos madrileños de Salvador Seguí, (Madrid 1978), pp. 67–70 [Interview in El Heraldo, a bourgeois newspaper, Madrid, October 1919].
24 Op. cit., pp 135–136 [See Vida Nueva, 12 June 1922].
25 Op. cit. p. 284–285 [A talk on “Anarchism and Trade Unionism” given in La Mola prison in Mahón, 31 December 1920].
26 Ángel Pestaña, ¿Sindicato único? (Orientaciones Sobre organización sindical) (Madrid 1921), pp. 19–21.