SITUATION IN SPAIN

Evening Post, Volume CXXI, Issue 138, 12 June 1936, Page 18

SITUATION IN SPAIN

RESTRAINING ELEMENT

ROLE OF THE CATALANS

Superficially the groundswell of the Spanish Popular Front is the same phenomenon as the "united front" against Fascism which the shock of the Doumergue regime in 1934 has brought about in France, writes a Spanish correspondent in the "Manchester Guardian." Actually, the pattern in Spain is much more complex. Fascism is the toy of an insignificant minority. What is more, the driving forces of revolt in Catalonia and in the rest of Spain differ greatly. Catalan nationalism, certainly, has all the dynamism of a revolutionary movement, and the record of Barcelona and its gunmen would seem to cast that city for the role of the Petrograd Soviet in 1917. Yet Catalonia, which might be expected to be the spearhead of the Spanish revolutionary movement,, is actually its despair.

Throughout the ages the Catalans have been an actiVe, energetic, but essentially bourgeois community. The traditional system of land tenure and the wide distribution of property have fostered a nation of smallholders, artisans, and petty' capitalists who have much more than their chains to lose. Four years ago the amount registered in . savings-bank accounts was higher in proportion to population than in any country in Europe, and in recent years it has, if anything, augmented. The Esquerra, a fusion of various Catalanist parties of the Left and Centre, is essentially a middleclass creation. A SOLVENT. The all-consuming flame of nationalism, which General Primo de Rivera vainly attempted to damp down, has been an effective solvent of class differences. Colonel Macia, the originator of the Esquerra, was thus successful in rallying to his standard the various elements of the lower middle class which in other countries, from fear of being crushed between the upper and nether millstones of capital and labour, have sought refuge in Fascism. Above all, the strength of the Esquerra has always lain in its careful attention to the interests of the smallholders. In contrast with the rest of Spain, peasant proprietorship is the rule'in Catalonia, and by the side of the actual land-owning peasants there are the "rabassaires" of various grades, tenant-farmers with a chance of obtaining land for themselves after] a certain period, in whose interests the "ley de cultivos" was conceived, that law which was challenged by the land owners and," after being declared unconstitutional by the Tribunal of Constitutional Guarantees, was the immediate occasion of the armed conflict of October 6, 1934. Between these individualists and the proletarian masses of Barcelona nurtured in the doctrines of the classstruggle there is, of course, a great gulf fixed. But the proletariat is relatively small in numbers. The factoryworkers and textile operatives in the capital and in industrial .centres like Sabadell. and Mataro are well paid (some of them earn as much as a thousand pesetas, or nearly £28, a month) and aspire to the dignity of being small capitalists, with their own little piece of land. Moreover, the presence in the ruling clique of Lluis Companys. who as a rising barrister defended anarcho-Syndicallst gunmen in the troubled years preceding the dictatorship, was a means of ensuring the benevolent neutrality at any rate of the C.N.T. (the Syndicalist organisation) in the first fine rapture of autonomous Catalonia. Later, in 1933, the class-struggle was joined, the Esquerra Government found it necessary to take strong measures against a number of militant trade unions, and the honeymoon period was over. Since then the C.N.T. has reverted to its original position; it will have no truck with Catalanism, which is regarded as a typical bourgeois red herring. BARRIERS RAISED. The barriers were raised, it is true, for the elections of February 16. For the sake of the amnesty Syndicalists and Socialists made common cause with groups whose ideas on social policy are diametrically, opposed to their own. Socialists and Communists (but not Syndicalists) were even prepared to Catalanism, a remarkable change of front to anyone who knows the record of the Spanish Socialist Party with regard to Catalan claims. This wooing of Catalanism by the parties of the Left is riot the least amusing" feature of the present situation in Spain. For the time being the mass of the workers are being swept along with the stream of Catalan sclf-congratula-tion. But the relations of the Government with the C.N.T. are ' decidedly strained. Catalan patriots have not yet forgiven the C.N.T. leaders for opposing the general strike declared on the morrow of October 6, 1934, and, what is more, issuing an appeal to the rank and file to resume work from a' microphone in the offices of the Military Governor. It is doubtful whether the C.N.T. now really has a following amounting to as much as half a million: whereas in the first eighteen months of the Republic it totalled over a million and was overhauling the Social-ist-U.G.T. (trade union) lead. Nevertheless, it is strong enough to put spokes in the wheel of the Socialist Revolution. Despite all the efforts of Socialist ■ and Communist factions Marxism still has no roots in Catalonia. THE "WORKERS' ALLIANCE." There is, however, another body having its main strength in Catalonia but competing not unsuccessfully with the official Marxist parties everywhere, particularly in Andalusia, where the distress of the agrarian proletariat is open to exploitation. This is the Alianza Obrera (Workers' Alliance), a fusion of the one-time workers' and peasants' coalition, captained by Joaquin Maurin, with the Left Communist Party led by Andres Nin. A regional branch of the A.O. was the ruling force of the workers' committee in the Asturias, and it claims chief credit for the revolt of October, 1934. The Socialist-U.G.T., needless to say, disputes the claim. In the revolutionary situation which is still latent in Spain there is good opportunity for prosecution of the tactics of building up from below, so to speak, workers' and peasants' soviets. In this the A.O. excels. This opposition Communism is dismissed as being of no account by one's friends among the Socialists. Time alone will show whether they are right.

People are going about saying that Communism will come to Spain any day now. An analysis of the various forces of "revolution," however, shows the strength of centrifugal tendencies in Spain. And Catalanism can easily turn the scales—against the Jacobins. The Catalans, always complain that in the past first Republicanism (Lerroux) and then Syndicalism were instruments manipulated against them by the central Government. It would be a fine piece of irony if now Senor Azana, who knows to an ounce the relative weight of these various factions, were to use Catalanism as an instrument for burking the social revolution.