Читать книгу Anarchism and Workers' Self-Management in Revolutionary Spain - Frank Mintz - Страница 4

An army revolt erupted in the Spanish protectorate in Morocco and in the Canaries on 17 July 1936 as a backlash against the Popular Front’s victory in the elections that February. The united right—including Gil Robles’s very proper CEDA party; the Falange with the laughable vote scored by its leader José Antonio Primo de Rivera in those elections and its prolific record of violent attacks; the Don Juan de Borbón-supporting monarchists and the dissident monarchists of the Carlist stripe with their requeté paramilitary groups in Navarra; most of the latifundists of Old and New Castile, Extremadura and Andalusia and virtually the entire upper echelons of the Catholic Church (except in the Basque Country and Catalonia)—fell into line behind the coup-makers (golpistas) who were led by generals Mola, Sanjurjo, Franco and the like.

It is to be borne in mind that the action must be violent in the extreme so as to shatter (as quickly as possible) the will of an enemy who is strong and well organized. Naturally, all leading lights of the political parties, societies or trade unions not committed to the Movimiento are to be jailed and exemplary punishment inflicted upon said individuals in order to snuff out acts of defiance or strikes…we must spread a climate of terror. [Secret Order No 1, signed by Mola in Madrid on 25 May 1936, the originally planned date for the coup.]

What lay behind such violence? General Gallifet set the example with his repression of the Paris Commune, where upwards of 30,000 children, women and men were shot down: capitalism needs its workforce terror-stricken, domesticated and decapitated.

The republican government, made up of the centre left parties and PSOE (Partido Socialista Obrero Español /Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party), had been very naive about the right back in 1931, and failed to purge the previous regime’s forces of repression or to implement immediate social reforms in the countryside and in industry (as they had been promising they would just before they came to power). In the face of a right that made no bones about its admiration for Mussolini’s fascism and its sympathies for Hitler’s Germany, the republican government of 1936 proved incapable of devising an effective defensive strategy or of taking self-preservation measures.

Trade union militants and a few leftist groups were the galvanising factors driving the resistance of masses of workers and the odd segment of the republican forces of repression. And, paradoxically, the workers saw off the golpistas across more than half the country, which is why Mussolini and Hitler (and, to a lesser extent, Portugal’s Salazar) rushed in thousands of soldiers and impressive heavy military equipment.

Hitler, Mussolini and Salazar’s well-known contempt and disrespect for constitutional or international law, the grotesque ‘Non-Intervention’ policy adopted by France and Great Britain, the early leaks about genocidal slaughter of leftist militants throughout ‘rebel’ Spain and especially in Badajoz, triggered feelings of outrage and repugnance in workers who entrenched their gains and immediately converted the economy to meet the needs of those who had until so recently been overlooked.

Abroad, those same factors inspired many to assist the Spanish workers who were not only standing up to the rightwing, Catholic fascist crew but who had spontaneously taken over the means of production across much of republican Spain.

Hence the arrival in Spain of tens of thousands of genuine volunteers (as opposed to fascist mercenaries and Soviet ‘advisors’ and their cohorts from a number of communist parties in exile in France) from a range of nations, especially the Anglophone world. Among those front-line fighters, one of the most committed and thoughtful, albeit a man very modest and taciturn in the ranks of his Spanish comrades (because of the language difficulty no doubt), was George Orwell. Very many of these volunteers irrigated the soil of Spain with their blood (Orwell for one) or ended up buried there.

There are countless accounts in dozens of languages and particularly in English, emanating from both combatants and historians and researchers. I personally have drunk deeply of Burnett Bolloten’s erudite technique of backing every claim up with data, and checking out most of the historians’ quotations against the original sources. A reading of Vernon Richards’s Lessons of the Spanish Revolution, Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia and Gerald Brenan’s The Spanish Labyrinth (a positive inspiration to anyone unfamiliar with Díaz del Moral’s 1923 essay “Historia de las agitaciones campesinas andaluzas”, not to mention that it is an interesting and honest book) has proved enlightening. I relished and continue to relish my friend Noam Chomsky’s ­essay on the academic blindspots of bourgeois historians (taking as his example Gabriel Jackson’s book on the Spanish Civil War) in American Power and the New Mandarins (1969) and his comment that “a deep bias against social revolution in Spain and a commitment to the values and social order of liberal bourgeois democracy has led the author to misrepresent crucial events and to overlook major historical currents”. Equally laudable are his many references to the impromptu achievements of the Spanish workers during the Spanish Revolution.

“A day will come when we will have to sum up the lessons of experience thrown up by our revolution”, Abad de Santillán, Por qué perdimos la guerra (Madrid 1975), p. 78.

“The anarchists themselves, who were and are most concerned to propagandize the work of the collectives, have produced at best only very limited surveys of them. Eye-witness accounts have also a fragmentary quality which makes generalization from them difficult”, Stephen John Brademas, Revolution and Social Revolution: Contribution to the history of the Anarcho-syndicalist Movement in Spain 1930–1937 (Oxford, typewritten thesis, 1953), p. 313.

“In spite of sabotage from bourgeois republicans, some two million workers ran the factories and harvested the crops and tended the land, turning the capitalist consumer economy into a war economy. In the midst of revolution, and its contradictions and controversy, these were workers who knew that they were not prepared to suffer any longer, that they were trying to build a new life, having started on the basis of past experience by rejecting the assumption that their leaders might approve, because in such circumstances ‘order and discipline’ is simply a weapon in the armoury of the traitors who would disarm the people and reintroduce the police who will stand guard over their property. There is only one yardstick by which the Revolution can be judged: the workers’ conditions, their standard of living and their power. And only in Spain had the workers sufficient clarity and strength thanks to their anarcho-syndicalist training to pursue their ideal of emancipation in the sphere of the economy”, foreword to the French translation of Vernon Richards’s Lessons of the Spanish Revolution (1973, revised 2009).

The three quotations above address a double reality: a dearth of information and deliberate misinformation. Caught up in a tunnel-visioned struggle against Francoism, teetering between hopes of evolution or revolution, Spanish anarcho-­syndicalists—with the odd exception—forgot to publicise their ventures into self-management, just as their Russian brethren banished from the USSR twenty years previously had done.

The official reporters and historians—in the pay of the masters of capitalist bounty or the communist parties (Moscow once upon a time, and these days Beijing)—are not at liberty to publicise and heap praise upon periods in history when millions of inhabitants organised themselves from the ground up, free of ‘upper echelons’, free of parties and university- or central-committee-schooled leadership.

From the infancy of human organisation and the days of cave paintings, a hierarchical arrangement of society has been foisted upon us as the only possible and efficient model. It stands for the rule of the rich white man, with the odd and occasional female gate-crasher to ease and offer diversion from the toil of man. Self-management in Spain, imposed from below, was largely the handiwork of the women, the elderly, the young and the disabled (See ­Appendix VIII).

And their feats belong to one and all. From the epic of Spartacus through to the day-to-day rejection of capitalism across every continent, the class struggle is replayed on a small scale and, sometimes, on a larger one (as in Ecuador, Bolivia and Argentina since 2001). Such is the ongoing contribution that the battlers have to offer: a past to learn about and be inspired by with an eye to improvisation in today’s world.

Not that the pressures of neo-liberalism and economic crises serve only to fragment the exploited and reduce them to despair and isolation in the face of poverty and police repression. A long way away from Spain, in Argentina, in Patagonia in the south and in the northern reaches close to the border with Bolivia, since 1996–1998, women have been heavily involved in agitation (though the feminists have been largely absent). The unemployed have cordoned off the highways, which, following the collapse of the rail system due to the privatisation policies of neo-liberal Peronista president Carlos Menem, are almost the only means of communication within the country. A national highway, sealed off, promptly creates a breakdown of stocks and the supply chain in every realm: from medicines and foodstuffs to spares in every sector of the economy.

Maybe this had to do with the trail blazed by the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo during the Argentine military dictatorship between 1976 and 1983. Virtually alone in the midst of the raging repression, the Mothers mounted a week-in, week-out silent, unrelenting, peaceful demonstration right in the heart of the federal capital, demanding answers to their questions about the violent, unlawful kidnappings of their sons and husbands. They were and are still a source of inspiration, an approach to be aped, an improvised example to be imitated. Or maybe it was the pre-Columbian tradition of collective mutual aid seen among the Mapuches in southern Argentina or among the Guarani in the north. But the fact is that the picket-lines made up of class-conscious, jobless piqueteros, active alongside their wives and children, with solidarity forthcoming from small producers and businesses, blocked the traffic and eventually secured subsidies and a few jobs. As the tide of privatisation continued in Argentina and with the crisis of 19 and 20 December 2001, the piquetero phenomenon and the attitude of “a plague on all their [those responsible for the crisis] houses” swept the entire country.

In spite of all the pressures and politically motivated bribery, the piquetero movement continues to impact Argentine society. Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis’s documentary The Take, about the collective resistance by the exploited, is a faithful reflection of this (albeit somewhat overtaken by events, given the pace at which Argentine social life moves). Self-management of struggles and a reorganisation of the fabric of society represent the response of the most oppressed to unbridled capitalism. Confronted with the capitalist cult of ‘winning’ and of success for success’s sake—no matter how that success may be achieved and blessed by financial and legal rewards—in Argentina there are groups of individuals who, for their survival, look to the collective, creative daily practices of allotments, roadblocks, bakeries and even schools—eschewing all hierarchy.

Amid the usual blinkered outlook of the ruling class, this vision comes very close to something first spelled out a long time ago: “Our ideal for everybody…is freedom, morality, intelligence and well-being for each through the solidarity of all—the brotherhood of man”.8 The counsel and promises offered by a political leader to the workers and unemployed amount to a hoax: “if, when speaking to them about revolution or, if you prefer, social change, he tells them that political change must come before economic change: or if he denies that they should pursue both simultaneously, or even that the political revolution should be merely the short-term, direct implementation of the complete and utter liquidation of society, they should turn their backs on him, for he is either an out-and-out fool, or a hypocritical exploiter”.9 What we have is not so much short-sightedness on the part of the ruling classes as the mounting of an all-out, unrelenting genocide against the disinherited of the Third World, driven by the First World and with the connivance of Third World rulers. One has only to look at France’s policies towards her erstwhile African possessions. The success of presidents Mitterrand, Chirac and Sarkozy is measured in terms of their implementation of a policy of terror and slow slaughter in those ex-colonies alongside a ‘quiet fascism’ in the metropolis and with Le Monde diplomatique rinsing First World imperialism in ‘criticism-light’. Those who prattle about a different world cannot pretend to endow capitalism with a human face if its very mechanisms and postulates amount to a seed-bed of criminal inequality. The so-called ‘nanny state’ or periods of apparent prosperity for the First World’s lower classes were always bought at the price of ongoing bloody exploitation and the looting of continents that are wide open to exploitation by the multi-nationals.

I was not trained on the basis of some vocation as a professional historian, but rather became one out of the need to clarify and criticise anarchist thought, in France and in Spain alike; I refer to the critical, anarcho-communist (and, later, anarcho-syndicalist) strain of anarchism that I picked up in the Noir et Rouge group. Then again, when I read descriptions of Russian kolkhozes and Chinese communes, I had the impression that I was reading naive texts, or that they were interweaving truth and lies and were bereft of critical capacity. But the same feeling stole over me when I came to read references to the Spanish libertarian collectives by authoritative writers such as Gaston Leval or José Peirats. Such was the depth of conviction of those comrades that they forgot to systematically rehearse the economic ­advances made.

In 1962, at the Sorbonne, I submitted a thesis in Spanish on collectivisation during the Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939, adopting a resolutely critical approach and shunning triumphalism in my statistical estimates and spelling out potential contradictions between the theory and the practice. A French translation saw publication in 1969. In 1976, further documentation was added and an expanded Spanish edition was published in Madrid in 1977 as La autogestión en la España revolucionaria. In 1999, I produced an overview in French, dispensing with the economic tables and devoting additional space to reflection. In 2006, an updated version was published in Madrid, and a more comprehensive edition in Buenos Aires in 2009.10

At the same time I carried on publishing analysis that recognises no sacred cows by helping with the publication of a Spanish version of Vernon Richards’s Lessons of the Spanish Revolution, by La Hormiga publishers in Paris.11I was able to carry on raising and publicising a number of writings and issues relating to the Spanish libertarian movement and other broader issues by means of essays, anthologies and translations (French editions of writings by Berneri, Malatesta, Kropotkin, Chomsky, Pano Vassilev, the Noir et Rouge review, Max Nettlau, Osvaldo Bayer’s Patagonia rebelde and Bakunin, plus, in Spanish, works by Kropotkin, Bakunin and Anatol Gorelik), with or without recourse to pen names (such as Israël Renof or Martin Zemliak). Pen names were a necessary precaution due to monitoring by the Bulgarian counter-espionage agency (1965–1989), as I’d married a Bulgarian woman, the sister of an anarcho-communist comrade living in France as a political emigré, after fourteen months of (fruitless) search for ‘connections’. Having seen Marxist-leninism and ‘actually existing socialism’ at close quarters,12 as well as having an inside knowledge of European and Latin American capitalism, I was convinced of the economic and social inanity of them both (having seen little improvement for the people between 1950 and 2009).

As a lecturer working on the outskirts of Paris and now in retirement, I have alternated between such work and trade union activity within France’s home-grown CNT (since 1994). My own ideology is not the anarchism that customarily embraces differing tendencies within a single whole, with the inevitable frictions and impediments for one and all. I prefer to describe myself as an anarcho-syndicalist, in the knowledge that the practice of solidarity and direct action is more important than any label, as was seen in the Spain of 1936 and as can be found among critical piquetero sectors in today’s Argentina.

Frank Mintz, February 2009

8 Bakunin, The Secret Statutes of the Alliance: The Programme and Purpose of the revolutionary organisation, the International Brotherhood, 1868.

9 Bakunin, “The Policy of the International” in L’Égalité, No 31, 21 August 1869.

10 Ever since I first came to grips with the question of the Spanish Revolution, back in 1936, I have been indebted to the Noir et Rouge group, specially Christian Lagant and Todor Mitev; my colleagues Aristide Rumeau, Rafael Pujol Marigot, Josep Fornas; my anarchist or anarcho-syndicalism comrades Antonia Fontanillas, Fernando Gómez Peláez, Gueorgui Balkanski, Rudolf de Jong, Renée Lamberet, José Llop, Valerio Mas and Liberto Sarrau. Subsequently joined by Simone Guittard, the comrades from the Paris-based …editions CNT-RP, the team at the International Institute for Social History in Amsterdam, the friends and comrades from ‘Traficantes de Sueños’ in Madrid, the CGT of Spain and ‘Anarres’ in Buenos Aires.

11 The translation of this book by the Chilean comrade Laín Díez was rejected for publication in the 1960s by the Argentinean anarchist publishing house Proyección as unduly critical of the CNT.

12 I have known exceptional people, one-time Leninists or Leninist faithful who have been open-minded and ‘sound’ and who saw eye to eye with me in exposing oppression and the bourgeoisie in the light of their ideology. My criticisms are directed at the body of doctrine rather than at those who genuinely strive for a better world (and this goes also for the followers of any religion, as long as they are tolerant and ‘sound’).