Happy May Day, comrade. It's a holiday
that is widely uncelebrated in my country, even though it is meant to
commemorate the
Haymarket
Massacre, which of course happened in my
hometown. According to
Wikipedia,
the US government instead assigned May 1 such comical/Orwellian names
as 'Americanization Day,' 'Loyalty Day,' and 'Law Day.' In any case, if you've got the day off
or are working an 8-hour day (rather than a 14-hour day, or at least
getting overtime pay), you've got unions, socialists, and anarchists
of past generations to thank for it.
For today's post I give you the Ex's
1936, the Spanish Revolution double 7". Those who know the Ex
can probably already attest to the beauty of this release, but I'll
get to that in a minute. First I want to talk about the revolution
itself. It was a pretty special thing; it's not every day that
ordinary people come together to create a relatively well-implemented
anarchist economy and society. If you just want to take free music
without learning anything cool, or if you're a Spanish Revolution
historian, jump to the bottom. The overview is a little lengthy.
The context in which the revolution
took place would be a pretty good place to start. Up to the 1930s,
Spain was a largely preindustrial country controlled by wealthy
landowners, the Catholic Church, and a series of monarchs and
military dictators. Meanwhile, revolutionary fervor was brewing.
Through the turn of the 20th century anarcho-syndicalism
grew popular in rural Spain, and to a lesser extent in cities as
well. The industrial sector was particularly rife with labor
conflict. Strikes were a regular occurrence, and were often violently
broken. Many thousands of workers were jailed or killed in numerous
strike-busting clashes with bosses, police, and the military. In
1910, the CNT (
Confederación
Nacional del Trabajo), Spain's national
anarchist labor union, came forth from a series of similar previous
organizations. The militantly revolutionary FAI (
Federación
Anarquista Ibérica) was formed in 1927,
following an exasperating decade of postwar economic turmoil that
would be exacerbated by the coming worldwide Depression.
In 1931, the Second Spanish Republic
came to power, consisting of a "largely self-appointed group of
leaders of several small parties that had been formed within the past
two or three years."
1 The most pronounced change was the
rise of anticlerical hostility, as the new government began to
dismantle the Church's political authority. Though socialists were
initially well-represented in the coalition government, things had
swung to the right by 1934 with the rise of the monarchist pro-Catholic
CEDA
party, and many of the initial reforms were undone. This was
contemporaneous with the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany, the
Dollfuss regime in Austria
2 and on the tails of
substantial rightward shifts in Italy and the USSR. Socialist and
anarchist miners in the northern Asturias region staged a
rebellion/general
strike that was viciously crushed by military
forces led by General Francisco Franco. The shelling decimated the
capital city of Oviedo. The rebellion was followed by intensified
repression consisting of political executions, mass jailings (on the
order of 30,000-40,000)
3, wage cuts, and counter-reform.
Franco led the
Army
of Africa in a coup against the Second Republic
on July 17, 1936, marking the official start of the Spanish Civil
War. It was in this period of wartime instability that the anarchist
revolution materialized. In the days following the coup, the CNT
mobilized the workforce to take control of the factories, foundries,
and transportation infrastructure, as well as organizing militias.
Noam Chomsky summarizes (better than I can) the revolution in his
1968 essay "Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship":
During the months following
the Franco insurrection in July 1936, a social revolution of
unprecedented scope took place throughout much of Spain. It had no
"revolutionary vanguard" and appears to have been largely
spontaneous, involving masses of urban and rural laborers in a
radical transformation of social and economic conditions that
persisted, with remarkable success, until it was crushed by force
[…]
The left-wing socialist
leader Largo Caballero had demanded in June that the workers be
armed, but was refused by Azaña. When the coup came, the Republican
government was paralyzed. Workers armed themselves in Madrid and
Barcelona, robbing government armories and even ships in the harbor,
and put down the insurrection while the government vacillated, torn
between the twin dangers of submitting to Franco and arming the
working classes. In large areas of Spain, effective authority passed
into the hands of the anarchist and socialist workers who had played
a substantial, generally dominant role in putting down the
insurrection.
The next few months have
frequently been described as a period of "dual power." In
Barcelona, industry and commerce were largely collectivized, and a
wave of collectivization spread through rural areas, as well as towns
and villages, in Aragon, Castile, and the Levante, and to a lesser
but still significant extent in many parts of Catalonia, Asturias, Es
tremadura, and Andalusia […] The revolution was "apolitical,"
in the sense that its organs of power and administration remained
separate from the central Republican government and, even after
several anarchist leaders entered the government in the autumn of
1936, continued to function fairly independently until the revolution
was finally crushed between the fascist and Communist-led Republican
forces. The success of collectivization of industry and commerce in
Barcelona impressed even highly unsympathetic observers such as Franz
Borkenau. The scale of rural collectivization is indicated by these
data from anarchist sources: in Aragon, 450 collectives with 500,000
members; in the Levante, 900 collectives accounting for about half
the agricultural production and 70 percent of marketing in this, the
richest agricultural region of Spain; in Castile, 300 collectives
with about 100,000 members. […]
The period of July through
September may be characterized as one of spontaneous, widespread, but
unconsummated social revolution. A number of anarchist leaders joined
the government; the reason, as stated by Federica Montseny on January
3, 1937, was this: ". . . . . the anarchists have entered the
government to prevent the Revolution from deviating and in order to
carry it further beyond the war, and also to oppose any dictatorial
tendency, from wherever it might come." The central government
fell increasingly under Communist control -- in Catalonia, under the
control of the Communist-dominated PSUC (Partit Socialista Unificat
de Catalunya) -- largely as a result of the valuable Russian military
assistance. Communist success was greatest in the rich farming areas
of the Levante (the government moved to Valencia, capital of one of
the provinces), where prosperous farm owners flocked to the Peasant
Federation that the party had organized to protect the wealthy
farmers; this federation "served as a powerful instrument in
checking the rural collectivization promoted by the agricultural
workers of the province." Elsewhere as well,
counterrevolutionary successes reflected increasing Communist
dominance of the Republic.
The first phase of the
counterrevolution was the legalization and regulation of those
accomplishments of the revolution that appeared irreversible. A
decree of October 7 by the Communist minister of agriculture, Vicente
Uribe, legalized certain expropriations -- namely, of lands belonging
to participants in the Franco revolt […] The decree compelled
tenants to continue paying rent unless the landowners had supported
Franco, and by guaranteeing former landholdings, it prevented
distribution of land to the village poor […]
The second stage of the
counterrevolution, from October 1936 through May 1937, involved the
destruction of the local committees, the replacement of the militia
by a conventional army, and the reestablishment of the
prerevolutionary social and economic system, wherever this was
possible. Finally in May 1937 came a direct attack on the working
class in Barcelona (the
May
Days). Following the success of this attack,
the process of liquidation of the revolution was completed. The
collectivization decree of October 24 was rescinded and industries
were "freed" from workers' control. Communist-led armies
swept through Aragon, destroying many collectives and dismantling
their organizations and, generally, bringing the area under the
control of the central government. Throughout the Republican-held
territories, the government, now under Communist domination, acted in
accordance with the plan announced in Pravda on December 17, 1936:
"So far as Catalonia is concerned, the cleaning up of Trotzkyist
and Anarcho-Syndicalist elements there has already begun, and it will
be carried out there with the same energy as in the U.S.S.R." --
and, we may add, in much the same manner.
In brief, the period from
the summer of 1936 to 1937 was one of revolution and
counter-revolution: the revolution was largely spontaneous with mass
participation of anarchist and socialist industrial and agricultural
workers; the counterrevolution was under Communist direction, the
Communist party increasingly coming to represent the right wing of
the Republic.4
[end
Chomsky]
After the
Communist-controlled, USSR-funded Republic government had effectively
suppressed and disarmed the anarchists and socialists, who had
constituted a significant proportion of the initial defenders against
Franco's rebels, it proceeded to lose the war against Franco, who
would go on to rule the Spanish State as a authoritarian dictatorship
until his death in 1975, at the ripe old age of 82.
The sad stuff is not what I really want
to emphasize, however. What is important about this piece of history
is the social revolution that took place: a wide-reaching
transformation of society to anarchist organization. The revolution
can be broadly divided into two main parts: collectivization of
industry and collectivization of agriculture.
Industrial collectivization began
within hours of the Fascist uprising. Workers in Catalonia "seized
control of 3000 enterprises. This included all public transportation
services, shipping, electric and power companies, gas and water
works, engineering and automobile assembly plants, mines, cement
works, textile mills and paper factories, electrical and chemical
concerns, glass bottle factories and perfumeries, food processing
plants and breweries."5
Major changes in the organization of the tramways dramatically
increased service while decreasing fares. Similarly, anarchist
organization of the vacated medical system (which had been run by
priests and nuns prior to the revolution) introduced socialized
medicine to thousands of Catalonians who had never before had access
to a doctor in their lives. Wages were mostly equalized across
industries, "and ex-bosses given the option of leaving or working as
one of the regular workers, which they often accepted."6
The revolution also
saw the introduction of many women to the workforce, though they
still had to contend with domestic work and were paid less than men.
In any case, industrial collectivization demonstrated the capacity of
the workers to run their own factories without falling into the "chaos" typically attributed to anarchist organization.
Agricultural collectivization was even
more extensive than the collectivization of industry, largely because
most of Spain's workers were still farmers. While the
collectivization was viewed as dangerous and harmful by small- and
medium-level farmers (and, obviously, the owners of large
landholdings), the majority of landless peasants welcomed the change.
Historian Burnett Bolloten describes the process of rural
collectivization:
A CNT-FAI committee was set up in each
locality where the new regime was instituted. This committee not only exercised legislative and executive powers, but also administered
justice. One of its first acts was to abolish private trade and to
collectivize the soil of the rich, and often that of the poor, as
well as farm buildings, machinery, livestock, and transport. Except
in rare cases, barbers, bakers, carpenters, sandalmakers, doctors,
dentists, teachers, blacksmiths, and tailors also came under the
collective system. Stocks of food and clothing and other necessities
were concentrated in a communal depot under the control of the
committee, and the church, if not rendered useless by fire, was
converted into a storehouse, dining hall, cafe, workshop, school,
garage, or barracks.7
Wages (which often took the form of
coupons rather than money) were based on the size of the family and
the amounts of food and supplies they needed. Resources that were
locally abundant were distributed freely or traded with neighboring
collectives. Although there were reported instances of forced
collectivization, this was not the norm. Small landowners who opted
not to join the collectives were given enough land to support
themselves but were not allowed to hire laborers, and were denied the
social/economic benefits given to members. Large numbers of small
farmers were thus compelled to join the collectives based on economic
pragmatism rather than threat of violence.8 The Chomsky essay quoted above cites reports that production increased in
many of the rural collectives.
Neither the industrial nor agricultural
collectivization was perfect – in fact, there were a number of
problems (see the Siedman book linked below). But imperfection has
hardly stopped us from accepting massively worse systems, such as the
one that is in place now. I am fascinated by the positive aspects of
the Spanish revolution, and it gives me hope that similar experiments
might be possible today (probably in developing countries, which
serve as the best approximations for 1930s Spain).
Which brings me to the records
themselves. In 1986, the Ex recorded four songs to commemorate the
50th anniversary of the revolution. Two songs are sung in
English, and two are in Spanish. They are versions (or syntheses) of
folk tunes sung by CNT-FAI partisans and those who aligned with them.
Some of the words date back to earlier struggles, such as the defense
against Napoleon's 1808 invasion. The Ex's arrangements of the songs
fit snugly into the infinitely mutable realm of 'Ex-music,' and these
are in fact some of my favorite Ex songs. The original release housed
the two 7'' discs in the front and back covers of a 144-page book
compiling scores of CNT archival photos from the period of 1936-1939.
It is a labor of love, as Begemot over at
La
Folie du Jour elaborates:
The Ex does not pretend to have
accomplished a historical or scientific task, and they make this
clear soon enough. They also deny any claim of objectivity: "…Thus
[the foto collection] it is a compilation: neither chronological nor
objective, but one-sided, partial and subjective. Only from the
anarchist’s side…" Instead, they point out their aim, which
has a double character: firstly, to show "…how much
pleasure, imagination, devotion and energy the Spanish anarchists put
in their effort to destroy once and for all the damned class of
boots, ties and crucifixes…", the fact that this attempt to
revolution "…saw an explosion of creativity which only
takes place when you're finally able to conceive of something and
follow through on it –to arrange your own life without hate and
greed, without competition and oppression…" and finally how
this effort "…was immediately [attacked], terrorized and
destroyed by the state and the bourgeoisie…" Secondly, their
aim is targeting to diagnose the similarities between the Spanish
experiment and the present: "…For us the Spanish
revolution is not just an event or incident, not just a chapter in a
history book. It’s an attempt similar to what we are doing now:
trying to get rid of this imposed shit system…" With that, the
conclusion comes by the Ex as an afterword: for them, the anarchist
experiment of the 30’s shows that "…it certainly is
possible to bring an anarchist society into practice…'"
So have a listen and have some
revolution in your life. Happy May Day.
Buy the Spanish Revolution 2x 3" CD + book direct from the Ex
For no one is a slave
Links of interest:
References
2.
Ibid, p. 635.
3. Gabriel Jackson. The Spanish Republic and the Civil War,
1931-1939. 1967 Princeton:
Princeton University Press. p.161.
6. Ibid.
8. Ibid,
p. 75.
