The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939

The only alternative systems to the free collectives for supplying the republican zone with food were either state collectives or dividing up the land into smallholdings. The nearest equivalents to state collectives were municipally organized farms. In the province of Jaén, for example, where the CNT was almost non-existent and the UGT weak, the municipality took over the land and organized it. Borkenau recorded that it employed the same braceros that the former landowners employed upon the same estates for the same endless working hours for the same starvation wages. ‘As nothing had changed in their living conditions so nothing had changed in their attitude. As they are ordered about as before and for the same wages, they start fighting the new administration of the estates as they did the old one.’²⁷ Borkenau also described how self-managed collectives were much happier when no better off than before. What mattered was that the labourers ran their own collectives–a distinct contrast to the disasters of state collectivization in the Soviet Union, which the peasants had resisted by slaughtering livestock and sabotaging the harvest.

The anarchists attacked the reparto, the division of land, because they thought that privately controlled land always creates a bourgeois mentality, ‘calculating and egotistical’, which they wanted to uproot for ever. But whatever the ideology, the self-managed co-operative was almost certainly the best solution to the food supply problem. The communists attacked the self-managed collectives as inefficient, but in Aragón production increased by a fifth.²⁸ Not only was non-collectivized production lower, but the individualists were to show the worst possible traits of the introverted and suspicious smallholder. When food was in short supply they hoarded it and created a thriving black market which, apart from disrupting supplies, did much to undermine morale in the republican zone. The communist civil governor of Cuenca admitted later that the smallholders who predominated in his province held on to their grain when the cities were starving.

The other criticism levelled against the collectives was their failure to deliver food to the front line in regular quantities at regular intervals. Obviously there were many cases of inefficiency, but overall the charge was unfair considering that all their vehicles and carts had already been commandeered. Whenever transport did arrive the peasants, not knowing when it would next be available, would pile on every possible foodstuff. The fault lay far more with the militia, who should have organized things the other way round and warned particular collectives of their needs in advance. The army and the International Brigades were also to suffer from bad distribution, often on an even worse scale.

The central government was alarmed by the developments in Aragón, where the anarchist militia columns exercised the only power in the whole of an area predominantly libertarian in sympathy. In late September delegates from the Aragonese collectives attended a conference at Bujaraloz, near where Durruti’s column was based. They decided to establish a Defence Council of Aragón and elected as president Joaquín Ascaso, a first cousin of Francisco Ascaso who fell in the Atarazanas assault.

Earlier that summer the government had tried without success to reestablish its control in Valencia by sending a delegation there under Martínez Barrio. It was brushed aside by the Popular Executive Committee, which consisted mainly of UGT and CNT members. Communist pleas for discipline and obedience to government orders went unheeded. Even so, the communists, who opposed free collectives, profited from local conditions in their recruiting drives. The rich Valencian countryside, la Huerta, was held in smallholdings by extremely conservative peasants, who were joined in their resistance to collectivization by many citrus farmers.

Giral’s government in Madrid did not share the anarchists’ enthusiasm for self-managed collectives. Nor did it welcome the fragmentation of central power with the establishment of local committees. Its liberal ministers believed in centralized government and a conventional property-owning democracy. They also felt, along with Prieto’s wing of the socialist party and the communists, that only discipline and organization could prevail against the enemy. Above all, they were appalled at having no control over the industrial base of Catalonia. But, after Martínez Barrio’s failure in Valencia, Giral’s administration could do little for the moment except try to keep up appearances. For the future, its continued control of supply and credit held out the prospect that concessions might gradually be wrung from the revolutionary organizations as a first step towards incorporating them into the state.

The Army of Africa and the People’s Militias