Angel Smith The Agony of Spanish Liberalism; From Revolution to Dictatorship 1913 23 (2010)

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.The Romanonesgovernment was obliged to repress the movement, declaring martial lawin Barcelona and suspending civil liberties throughout Spain.Under atumult of sharp criticism from the Employers Federation and the rat-tling of sabres in the Barcelona garrison, the discredited civil gover-nor and police chief were dismissed; they then fled to Madrid, whereRomanones later resigned.90The year 1919 brutally exposed the inability of the Restorationauthorities to pacify an increasingly conflictive industrial relations con-text through negotiation or reform.The Spanish government signedup to the Versailles Treaty, a move that raised hopes among manyRepublicans and Socialists that the International Labour Organizationmight bolster an institutionalized system of trade unionism and heraldthe gradual democratization of the political system.91 Yet any such uto-pian aspirations floundered on the traditional hostility of capitalists to112 Chris Ealhamstate intervention in industry,92 and on the bedrock of the hardeningauthoritarian stance of the most reactionary groups of Spanish society.Evidence of this came in September, when the syndicalist wing of theBarcelona CNT and complaisant elements within the bourgeoisie agreedto submit disputes to the Mixed Commission (Comisión mixta), a state-sponsored arbitration committee, their hopes scotched by a flare-up ofsocial and industrial conflict after the Barcelona Employers Federationdeclared an 84-day lockout of some 300,000 workers, lasting from 3November 1919 to 26 January 1920.93The experience of Barcelona s labour relations increasingly inspireda reactionary utopia of pacifying industrial relations manu militari.TheEmployers Federation sought to destroy the CNT in a bid to reassert itsunfettered right to determine working conditions.As growing circles ofcapitalists became alienated from the Restoration state, the underlyingfeeling among the Employers Federation was that the Madrid author-ities lacked the political will to take on the unions and that the distantcentral power was out of touch with their concerns.Salvation for a sec-tion of the bourgeoisie lay with the military, and this group opted toact autonomously of central government, a freedom of manoeuvre thatpeaked with the September 1923 coup.In the interim period, the social war in Barcelona gathered pace.Inautumn 1919, the Sindicatos Libres (Free Trade Unions) was establishedwith the support of the Employers Federation and the Barcelona gar-rison.An extreme right-wing, Catholic union, the Libres was commit-ted to breaking the power of the CNT, mainly through strike-breakingactivities that were backed up by its paramilitary wing.94 With cenetis-tas increasingly demonized as felons in the conservative press, newauthoritarian civic groups such as the Somat�n militia and AcciónCiudadana augmented police patrols on the streets in order to banishcriminal types from Barcelona.95 In practice, while the CNT was not aprescribed organization, anyone found with a membership card facedthe prospect of being sacked, arrested or beaten, as the strident pur-suit of a law-and-order agenda produced numerous infringements ofcivil rights, including the freedom of workers to join the union of theirchoice.Now, preventive arrest, internment without trial and internaldeportation were the order of the day.96The assault on the CNT gathered pace after 8 November 1920, withthe appointment of General Severiano Mart�nez Anido, the military gov-ernor of the Barcelona garrison, as civil governor, following intensivelobbying by the Employers Federation and military top brass.Havingserved previously in Morocco and the Philippines, Mart�nez Anido ruledAn Impossible Unity 113Barcelona as if it were a colonial fiefdom, appointing General MiguelArlegui as city police chief, and unleashing a two-year reign of terrorbased on the ley de fugas, a programme of selective assassination of CNTmilitants.At the height of the violence, in 1921, 113 people were killedand 95 wounded, the majority Barcelona cenetistas.97 It is noteworthythat the admirers of this bloody tactic included General Miguel Primode Rivera, then head of the Valencia garrison.98The CNT now experienced more or less constant repression untilthe 1923 coup.There was a brief respite under the government of Jos�S�nchez Guerra, who removed Mart�nez Anido and Arlegui, but eventhen the CNT s freedom of manoeuvre was curtailed.The intenserepression took its toll: not only were key figures in the organizationassassinated (Segu� suffered this fate in March 1923), but the everydayclimate of fear and the disarticulation of CNT structures produced ahaemorrhage of members.99 By September 1923, CNT membership hasbeen estimated at between 300 and 400,000.100 Some 45 years later,one astute anarchist analyst of the CNT reflected that by this time theCNT was almost bled dry , the La Canadiense strike had been ourWaterloo.101While the ferocious anti-union offensive could not finish with theCNT, it nevertheless exerted a profound impact on the internal balanceof forces within the Confederation, aiding the ascendancy of the radicalanarchists, validating their paramilitary activities and the tactical shiftaway from mass union mobilizations towards small group activity, suchas the assassination of politicians and employers.When the authoritiesprevented the CNT from collecting union dues from members, thuscompromising the Confederation s principles of active solidarity, whichincluded helping the jailed comrades and their families through theComit� pro-presos (Prisoners Support Groups), armed groups respondedwith a string of spectacular bank raids to strengthen union funds onthe brink of collapse.102 This climate of violence permanent disorderin the view of one scholar103 generated immense insecurity among theelite and became an important factor in the build-up to the 1923 coup,and it is significant that General Primo de Rivera was captain generalof Catalonia during this time, where the armed anarchist groups weremost active.104ConclusionCommunism was widely debated on the Left in the years immediatelyafter the war.The topic was given full vent in the anarchist press, later114 Chris Ealhamin the Socialist press, and, of course, in Communist newspapers.Theelites could readily conclude that Communist fever was gripping thecountry.This was all the more troubling as this phenomenon dove-tailed with the widespread growth of mass mobilization.For the firsttime, labour conflicts were occurring across the state.Yet the growing strength of labour masked fissiparous tendencieson the Left.By 1923, leftist divisions, coupled with widespread popu-lar revulsion towards the Restoration state, which had repressed andexcluded broad sectors of the masses, clearly aided the success of thecoup.Indeed, such was the intensity of the anti-leftist assault after 1917that many understandably felt they were already experiencing dictator-ship before 1923.Any popular defence of such a discredited system wasunimaginable.The memory of the easy coup of 1923 was very muchin the mind of the Right in 1936, when sections of the army and theirFascist civilian supporters expected a swift, effortless victory.There wasno rerun in 1936.Besides the desire to halt the onward march of Fascism,the Left had learnt from its earlier disunity, even if it was a slow learn-ing process [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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