Blood of Spain: An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War by Ronald Fraser

Author:Ronald Fraser
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: General, History
ISBN: 9781448138180
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2012-06-28T22:00:00+00:00

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The only dilemma is this: either victory over Franco through a revolutionary war, or defeat.

Camillo Berneri, Italian anarchist (Barcelona, November 1936)

* * *

The libertarians lacked the rigorous certainties of the communist party on the crucial issues of war and revolution. Durruti’s statement, ‘We renounce everything except victory’, was often adduced to mean that the revolution must be sacrificed to win the war. Given his other statements of the time, it was dubious that he meant to go so far. Rather – as the first anarchist leader to realize that the working class was facing a civil war – he was aware that sacrifices in traditional libertarian aspirations would have to be made if the war were to be won.

A range of opinion, from those like Eduardo de GUZMAN, CNT journalist in Madrid, who believed that only by making the revolution was it possible to win the war, to others who took Durruti’s ‘everything’ to include any further revolutionary advance, co-existed within the libertarian movement. GUZMAN was convinced that only the people’s revolutionary élan had crushed the military in Barcelona and Madrid, and saved the capital in November. ‘It was the grave mistake of all working-class organizations, including the CNT, to sacrifice the revolution in order to win the war.’ The libertarians in Barcelona had made a serious error in not taking power from the start, in overlooking the fact that the state apparatus had considerable weight, even when disarmed.

—The petty bourgeoisie was inevitably opposed to the proletariat. The communists were recruiting in this class, and in alliance with the petty bourgeois republicans were bound to gain strength if the Generalitat and the central government were reconstituted …

The CNT had failed to push home the idea of setting up a trade union government in the first couple of months when there was no effective government at all; a revolutionary moment of great promise had been lost, he thought. This was due perhaps to the CNT’s insufficient politicization; to be a-political, anti-political, did not mean to have no political sense. It meant simply not to participate in the farce of elections. ‘Like it or not, politics existed – and revolutionary politics doubly so!’

In his view, none of the working-class organizations had matched the historic demands made of them. There was, in the working class, a great desire for unity, a desire ‘to carry through the total revolution’. At the very least, total working-class democracy, in which all working-class parties and organizations would have participated on an equal footing.

From the moment the Catalan anarchists had accepted collaboration with the Popular Front forces in Barcelona, Lorenzo IÑIGO, libertarian youth councillor for war industries on the Madrid defence junta, had not believed it would be possible to make the libertarian revolution. But what he did believe was that it would be possible to make partial revolutionary conquests of a libertarian nature which would ensure, when the war was over, that the pre-war petty bourgeois republican regime could not return to power. Meanwhile, the

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