Navarro
Well-known member
Hear ye, about the manifold wonders of anarchist Catalonia!
The Anarchists were even more eager to assume governmental powers in Catalonia, where they were strong enough to overshadow the regional Catalonian government, the Generalitat. Rather than officially enter the Catalonian government, the Anarchists chose to retain the Generalitat as a legal cover; but real power shifted into the hands of the Anarchist-controlled Central Anti-Fascist Militia Committee. Bolloten indicates that for all practical purposes this Committee was the government of Catalonia under a new name: "the committee immediately became the de facto executive body in the region. Its power rested not on the shattered machinery of the state but on the revolutionary militia and police squads and upon the multitudinous committees that sprang up in the region during the first days of the Revolution. The work of the militia committee, attests Abad de Santillan, himself a member, included the establishment of revolutionary order in the rear, the creation of militia units for the front, the organization of the economy, and legislative and judicial action."[27] After a few months the Anarchists formally entered the Generalitat, mainly because the central government seemed unwilling to provide weapons to any other Catalonian organization.
It should be further noted that these Anarchist-run councils and committees were not mild-mannered minimal states, maintaining order while allowing the workers to organize themselves as they pleased. They were "modern" states, concerning themselves with the economy, education, propaganda, transportation, and virtually everything else.
The Anarchists' position in both the central government and in Catalonia slowly but surely declined after they entered into coalition governments with the other anti-Franco factions. A common pattern was for the non- Anarchists to push for some measure that the Anarchists opposed; the Anarchists would resist for a brief period; and finally, the Anarchists would agree to the original measure after changing some of the labels and minor details. By May of 1937, after a mere ten months in power, the Anarchists found themselves out-maneuvered on the national and regional levels by the Communists and other political enemies.
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Then again, perhaps the CNT yearned so strongly for power that they were willing to sacrifice many principles for limited authority. After May 1937, they endured considerable humiliation in exchange for a paltry role in the Republican government. Were there any limits to what principles the Anarchists would sacrifice in order to be minor political players? Apparently not. Stanley Payne indicates that the CNT leadership actually tried to strike a deal with the fascists in 1945 and 1946. As Payne explains, a Falangist leader "began negotiations that summer with the new clandestine secretary general of the CNT, Jose Leiva, in Madrid. His goal was to rescue the Falange by gaining the support of opposition anarchosyndicalists for a broader, stronger, and more popular national syndicalism. Franco eventually rejected the CNT's demands, and the negotiations foundered the following year. Suppression of the CNT leadership was renewed."[32] What was the nature of the deal that the CNT sought with the Falange? "According to a report presented to Franco in May 1946, the CNT leadership offered a policy of cooperation, proposing to withdraw from the Giral Republican government- in-exile and accept three Falangists on their national committee, but in return insisted on freedom to proselytize."[33]
This was the Anarchism of the CNT: an Anarchism which not only allied with the Communist totalitarians, but attempted to strike a power- sharing deal with the fascist totalitarians six years after the end of the civil war.
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In short, after being told that the workers now owned the means of production, the workers often took the statement literally. What is the point of owning the means of production if you can't get rich using them? But of course if some workers get rich, they are unlikely to voluntarily donate their profits to the other members of their class. This seems elementary upon reflection, but only practical experience was able to reveal this to the economic reformers of the Spanish Revolution.
Fraser explains that at a joint CNT-UGT textile union conference, "The woodworkers' union weighed in with its criticism of the state of affairs, alleging that, while small, insolvent workshops were left to struggle as best they could, the collectivization of profitable enterprises was leading to 'nothing other than the creation of two classes; the new rich and the eternal poor. We refuse the idea that there should be rich and poor collectives. And that is the real problem of collectivization.'"[43] Bolloten repeats a remark of CNT militia leader Ricardo Sanz: "'[T]hings are not going as well as they did in the early days of the [revolutionary] movement... The workers no longer think of workings long hours to help the front. They only think of working as little as possible and getting the highest possible wages.'"[44] Bolloten attributes this decline in enthusiasm to Communist repression, but it is at least as consistent with the simple observation that people often prefer improving their own lot in life to nourishing revolution.
In short, practical experience gradually revealed a basic truth of economics for which theoretical reflection would have sufficed: if the workers take over a factory, they will run it to benefit themselves. A worker-run firm is essentially identical to a capitalist firm in which the workers also happen to be the stockholders. Once they came to this realization, however dimly, the Spanish Anarchists had to either embrace capitalism as the corollary of worker control, or else denounce worker control as the corollary of capitalism. For the most part, they chose the latter course.
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Fraser quotes Albert Perez-Baro, a civil servant and a former CNT member: "'This truly revolutionary measure [the 50 per cent profits tax] - though rarely, if ever, applied - wasn't well received by large numbers of workers, proving, unfortunately, that their understanding of the scope of collectivization was very limited. Only a minority understood that collectivization meant the return to society of what, historically, had been appropriated by the capitalists...'"[55] In other words, most workers assumed that worker control meant that the workers would actually become the true owners of their workplaces, with all the rights and privileges thereof. Only the elite realized that worker control was merely a euphemism for "social control" which in turn can only mean control by the state (or an Anarchist "council," "committee," or "union," satisfying the standard Weberian definition of the state).
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Still, initially rural collectivization was indeed fairly "cantonalist," and it is conceivable that eventually peasant mobility would have forced local committees to relax the harshness of their regimes. The Anarchist leadership sensed this almost instinctively; soon voices urged regional and even national "federations." At a February 1937 congress, Fraser notes, "Among the major agreements reached at the congress were those to abolish all money, including local currency, and to substitute a standard ration book; to permit smallholders to remain non-collectivized as long as they did not 'interfere with the interests of the collective' from which they could expect no benefits; to organize the collectives at the district rather than local level; and to refuse the Council of Aragon the monopoly of foreign trade."[146] The self-limiting measures were clearly intended to shield the Council of Aragon from the anger of the central government and the Communists; the rest of the agreement reveals an intent to permit even more severe exploitation of the peasantry.
Anarchist historian Peirats describes a later conference in June 1937, which made the CNT's long-term intentions even plainer.
"[T]he National Committee of the CNT convened a National Meeting of Peasants with the express purpose of creating a National Federation of Peasants attached to the confederal organization. The primary objective defined in its statutes was the national integration of the agricultural economies of all the zones under cultivation, embracing both collectives and small proprietors. The Federation would accept UGT collectives and be responsible for technical consultation of all kinds through its regional branches. Small landholders, individual cultivators and collectives attached to the Federation would have full freedom to initiate agricultural development in their respective zones, but they would not be subject to national plans designed to ensure the best crop yields, the transformation or substitution of some crops for others of greater economic value and the combating of crop and livestock diseases.
"The federated cultivators were obliged to supply statistical data to the National Federation about current and projected production and whatever else necessary for general planning. The Federation was the sole distributor and exporter of produce.
"Cultivators could reserve enough of their production to meet their own consumption needs but had to observe restrictions which might be called for at a given time 'to ensure the equal right of all consumers without discrimination.' Surpluses were to be turned over to the Federation, which would pay for them 'according to local values' or as determined by a national price regulating board... The Federation would facilitate the moves of peasants from zones short of cultivable lands to zones needing workers. It would establish relations with all the economic organizations of the CNT and other groups, national or international. It created an auxiliary service to even out payments across diverse zones, national and foreign. Solidarity and mutual aid, including compensation for fires, accidents, pestilence, sickness, retirement, orphans, would be available even to individualists not participating in the collectives."[147]
In short, the CNT intended to create an all-powerful state to rule the rural population under its control; to seize all "surplus" from them and pay them token compensation as it saw fit; to relocate farmers to "zones needing workers." Given the fact that the CNT assured the peasants' subsistence but seized their surplus, it seems unlikely that any peasant would want to move. The CNT thought about this eventuality no more than a farmer ponders whether his herd of cows wants to be led to a new field.
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For some Anarchists, these pacts represented compromises. But then again, the CNT's initial programs were themselves a compromise between the Anarchists who wanted total power for the CNT from the outset. As Bolloten documents, from the earliest days of the revolution many Anarchists and Anarchist journals cried out for an Anarchist dictatorship. These remarks often make it clear that even the Anarchist opponents of seizing total power often agreed that once the Nationalists were defeated, the Anarchist dictatorship would swiftly follow.
"[E]ven when the Anarchosyndicalists respected the small man's property, some among them made it clear that this was only a temporary indulgence while the war lasted. 'Once the war has ended and the battle against fascism has been won,' warned a prominent Anarchosyndicalist [Tomas Cano Ruiz - B.C.] in Valencia, 'we shall suppress every form of small property and in the way that suits us. We shall intensify collectivization and socialization, and make them complete.'"[150]
Total rural collectivization, like total urban collectivization, was also an ultimate (if not immediate) Anarchist goal. "'Those peasants who are endowed with an understanding of the advantages of collectivization or with a clear revolutionary conscience and who have already begun to introduce [collective farming] should endeavor by all convincing means to prod the laggards,' said Tierra y Libertad , the mouthpiece of the FAI, which exercised strong ideological influence over the unions of the CNT. 'We cannot consent to small holdings... because private property in land always creates a bourgeois mentality, calculating and egotistical, that we wish to uproot forever. We want to reconstruct Spain materially and morally. Our revolution will be economic and ethical.'"[151] It is evident that many of the Spanish Anarchists had such a revolution in mind; a revolution which, like other modern totalitarian revolutions, would not only enslave the body, but enslave the mind. In this light, the Anarchists' much-praised focus on education seems far more malevolent.
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The writings and words of the Spanish Anarchists, even the titles of their periodicals, proclaim their love of freedom, their desire for liberty. The classical anarchists such as Bakunin indicated that they opposed state-socialism because they rightly saw that a socialist state was inconsistent with human freedom. But what exactly did the Spanish Anarchists mean by "freedom"?
Freedom of conscience, the freedom to believe what one likes without legal penalty, was plainly not an aspect of freedom as they saw it. They ruthlessly suppressed the Catholic religion, killing many church officials, burning churches, and forbidding religious education. While Bolloten carefully noted the internal Anarchist opposition to perceived "compromises," he never indicates that Anarchist ideologues saw religious intolerance as inconsistent with their ideals. Rather, the militants declared that because the Catholic religion was false, it should be snuffed out. " CNT , the leading libertarian organ in Madrid, declared editorially: 'Catholicism must be swept away implacably. We demand not that every church be destroyed, but that no vestige of religion should remain in any of them and that the black spider of fanaticism should not be allowed to spin the viscous and dusty web in which our moral and material values have until now been caught like flies. In Spain, more than any other country, the Catholic church has been at the head of every retrograde aim, of every measure taken against the people, of every attack on liberty.'"[152] No Anarchist cited shows the slightest appreciation of the principle that ideas should be tolerated even if they are false, reactionary, or retrograde.
Similarly, no Anarchist expresses any principled objection to killing people for their political beliefs. The Anarchist critics frequently argue that killing people hurts the revolution, or frightens the simple peasants, or alienates the middle classes. They do not argue that Falangists, monarchists, and Catholic corporatists have an inalienable right to their opinion, so long as they refrain from acting upon it. The idea does not even occur to them.
Nor did the "freedom" so acclaimed by the Anarchist militants include the freedom to use alcohol, tobacco, or sometimes even coffee.
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The theoretical problem that the Spanish Anarchists did not confront is straightforward. Once you declare unpleasant but non-violent acts to be "domination," you implicitly justify using violence to stop them. If Catholicism is "domination," then surely killing priests is a form of self-defense. If prostitution is "domination," then closing the brothels and making prostitutes take up another line of work is actually a form of liberation. If wage-labor is "domination," then forbidding a person to hire an eager worker (even a worker with the option of working for a large collective farm) actually saves the worker from victimization. What is the pattern here? By expanding the meaning of "domination" to include almost everything, you actually leave people with no freedom at all. All that remains is the Orwellian freedom to live precisely as the Anarchist council thinks right.
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