Chapter 3

 

The Drama of Spanish Socialism: Tragedy, Farce, or Conceptual Error?

 

 

Maria Victoria Lopez-Cordon (1976) has suggested that in the late 19th century the main revolutionary ideology of the dispossessed masses of Spain was anarchism, not socialism, for almost accidental reasons. With respect to the years of the liberal revolution and the First Republic (1868-1874), she writes:

[T]he Congress of Cordoba, celebrated the 25th of December to the 3d of January of 1873, adopted a series of resolutions of a character clearly anarchist and insisted on an apolitical posture. Why this preference? In the face of millenaristic or messianic interpretations, especially with respect to the proletariat of Andalucia, today it appears that one should give more weight to the fact that the implanting of a working class ideology depended essentially on whose propaganda got there first. That is to say, as Caleto's study has shown for the case of Granada, on the attitude of the intermediaries who linked the local nucleus with the outside world.  Let us not forget that we are dealing with a rural society, or with people of a similar mentality, where personal relations play a decisive role (1976: 51-52).

In favor of the hypothesis that intermediaries whom contemporary social movement theory might call "activist entrepreneurs"[1] made Spain more anarchist than socialist, it can be said that the average peasant or wage laborer might well have been unable to distinguish one group's slogans from another's.  The grievances of the suffering masses were the same.  The rhetoric employed to channel grievances into organized resistance was similar, whether the organization being built was anarchist or socialist. Therefore, who got to a particular village or worksite first could be decisive.

Nevertheless, it is important to mention some factors that lend credence to the views that Lopez-Cordon corrects.  The development of Spanish capitalism was extremely slow in both industry and agriculture.  Since Spain was overwhelmingly rural, it was agriculture that counted most. While in England common lands had been enclosed and peasants driven from the land as early as the 16^th century, for the sake of establishing export-oriented capitalist agriculture, the enclosure of common lands was still going on in Spain in the mid-19th century.[2]  In the late nineteenth century the transition from the comparatively easygoing rule of local nobles, who were essentially warrior chieftains, to rule by the merciless logic of profit maximization, was still within living memory.  Due to Spain's slow capitalist development, the Spanish peasantry had unusually recent experience with farming for their own consumption and for local markets with comparatively little interference from their overlords.  Therefore, although the anarchist ideal of comunismo libertario surely strikes the 21^st-century city-dweller as a utopian pipedream, it could seem like a real possibility to the 19^th-century Spanish peasant.  It took just a little rose-tinting of the memories of grandparents to make comunismo libertario an easily imagined modification of rural life in Spain as it had been, and to some extent in some places still was.[3]  The overlords might simply go away completely.  It is reported that in 1937 and 1938 in areas of Spain controlled by anarchists during the Civil War, the free and cooperative cultivation of land without landlords or bosses was actually practiced (Peirats 1977: 149-68).[4]  It should be remembered, too, that the workers who swelled the ranks of the anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist industrial unions of Barcelona in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were mainly recent arrivals from the countryside. 

In addition, the appeal of anarchism may have been enhanced by a cultural environment receptive to anarchism's generally combative attitudes.  Although there were strains of nearly Tolstoyan moral purity and pacifism in Spanish anarchism, its rejection of politics and its reliance on spontaneous action led naturally to the terrorist tactics for which it became famous.  The excitement of fighting seems to be an innate source of pleasure for the human species, and to be, in sublimated forms, the source of much of the energy that drives athletics, economics, and politics.  In Spain, the land of Don Quixote, a tradition of fighting for high ideals provided cultural reinforcement for this natural tendency.  Indeed, the great Spanish poet Antonio Machado was able, in the 1920s, to write with a straight face that Spain, alone among nations, had never gone to war for commercial gain, but had always fought for ideals.[5]

The Spaniards forged their national identity during seven long centuries of struggle against the Moors. When the several warring Christian kingdoms that were to become Spain ceased to fight each other, it was to unite under the banner of a faith against a common enemy with a different faith.  The ideals of the knight who fights for the Cross can easily be extended to fighting for secular justice.  To this day in the Spanish language members of secular political parties are sometimes called correligionarios.  A solution acceptable to all, even to those whose normative commitments are in principle opposed, is said to be acceptable tanto para moros como para cristianos (“for Moors as well as for Christians”). A solution rejected by all is one not accepted ni por moros ni por cristianos (“neither by Moors nor by Christians”).  When in 1492 the last emir was driven out of southern Spain, the Spaniards began almost immediately to do to the peoples of vast territories overseas what the Moors had done to the peoples of the Iberian peninsula: to conquer them in the name of God, to plunder their riches, to rule over them as a resident upper class, and to convert them to the one true faith.  It is therefore not implausible to suppose that anarchism's combination of a quasi-religious vision of justice on earth with violent revolutionary tactics appealed to knightly traditions that associated glory, honor, faith, and fighting.

In the late 19th century, "social democracy" was a generic term that embraced anarchism, socialism, and communism, as well as the currents that eventually became West European social democracy.  The party that would evolve to become the Spanish version of West European social democracy was the Socialist Workers Party of Spain, the PSOE (Partido Socialista Obrero de España).  It was from its founding, on May 2, 1879, a moderating and steadying influence among the impoverished and often desperate working masses.  Yet with all of its moderation and steadiness it always defined itself, under its great early leader, Pablo Iglesias, as a revolutionary party that worked to achieve a radical transformation of society's basic structures.  Critics on the left and admirers on the right said that whatever its rhetoric might be in any given period, in practice the PSOE was a reformist party, which employed peaceful and legal means to seek modest gains for workers within the framework of capitalism (Carr 1982: 717, 737; Share 1989: 27-31, 40).  This, however, was not the party's declared aim; it was not its own interpretation of its historical project.

Pablo Iglesias was more than the PSOE's leader.  He was its heart and soul.  He was nothing if he was not a man passionately devoted to the ethical construction of a transformed social reality.[6]  In his first published writing, written in 1870 when he was nineteen years old, written before he had read Marx, and published in a small and precarious revolutionary workers' weekly called La Solidaridad, Iglesias wrote:

 

What is war?  A crime.  If we were deists, if we believed in some of the gods that all the religions harbor in their breasts; if we believed, we repeat again, in some of those idols, we would say that war is a terrible punishment that the gods impose on the peoples of nations for their sins.  But, not being like that, not believing in those false divinities, the offsprings of heated brains, the creations of errant imaginations, and being, as we are, rationalists, we know that war is the offspring, and always has been, of a half dozen tyrants, of a half dozen assassins--yes, that is the right name for them--of a half dozen sick and miserable beings, unnatural monstrosities, who, sometimes out of pride, sometimes for mere adventure, sometimes from unbridled ambition, do not doubt, do not even vacillate, in sending their fellow beings, their brothers, to serve as fodder for cannons. . . (Quoted in Morato 1931: 40).[7]

 

At the age of seventy-five, on his deathbed, in October 1925, at a time when the dictator General Miguel Primo de Rivera had put an end to a period of revolutionary ferment, a few days before Pablo Iglesias lost the ability to put pen to paper and could write no more, he wrote: "Perhaps we will have to endure this regime for a long time; let us use that time to work for ideals, to defend them, so that they will be deeply rooted, so that they will live and make their home in full consciousness" (quoted in Morato, op. cit.: 246). 

From a very young age, the events of Pablo Iglesias' life contributed to his deepening understanding of the importance of a culture of solidarity.  Upon the death of her husband Pedro Iglesias, who had earned a meager living working for the town of Ferrol, Juana Posse, who could neither read nor write, took her two young boys, Pablo and Manuel, and set out on foot for Madrid, to seek help from an uncle, whom she believed to be employed as a servant in the palace of the Duke of Altamira. When the widow and her two sons arrived, they found that the uncle had died.  The two boys were placed in an orphanage, while Juana was left to fend for herself.[8]  In the orphanage, Pablo learned the trade of typesetting, which became the material basis of his future.  As a working typesetter, he was a member (in fact, a founder) of the typesetters union, and thus a member (in fact, a founder) of the Spanish labor movement.  As a typesetter, he was in a position to collaborate in putting out leftist publications, culminating in the newspaper El Socialista, of which he was the editor during most of his life.  Like many typesetters, he read the books he set into type.  He also read novels.  Although he had little formal schooling, he took advantage of several educational opportunities open to penniless youth in Madrid in the 1860s and 1870s, and once won a certificate as an outstanding student in French classes.  Although, as a class-conscious young worker, he read the works of a number of contemporary European socialist writers, his fundamental intellectual allegiance was to Karl Marx.  One of his biographers wrote [with our explanatory remarks in brackets]:

Lafargue [Paul Lafargue, son-in-law of Karl Marx, who came to Spain and helped lay the groundwork for the PSOE] returned to London [in 1873], La Emancipacion [a left-wing periodical in which Pablo Iglesias collaborated] continued to appear, now in contact with Engels and Marx, and there was created a rump of the Regional Federation [an early proletarian organization] composed of a handful of sections [a minority that included Iglesias] who did not agree with the criteria of the anarchists.

Lafargue sent a French edition of the Communist Manifesto, which was translated into Spanish and published in the periodical, as were single carefully selected chapters of Capital. At that time there was appearing the French translation of that book, which was being published a part at a time.  Iglesias in Madrid was in charge of receiving them and managing their publication. . . .

And these two fundamental works, read, studied, and meditated upon by Iglesias, gave him clear ideas, which he would never again modify (Morato 1931: 51).

What Iglesias learned from Marx confirmed his native bent toward making an ethical critique of capitalism, and toward advocating a transformed society based on better principles, those of solidarity.  We believe that a fair sample of the resulting Pablismo is found in the "considerations" which precede the program of the Socialist Workers Party of Spain, drafted mainly by Iglesias, and approved at the party congress in Barcelona in 1888. They are:

 

Considering:

That this society is unjust because it divides its members into two classes unequal and antagonistic: one, the bourgeoisie, which, possessing the instruments of work, is the dominant class; another, the proletariat, which does not possess more than its living energy, is the dominated class;

 

That the economic subjection of the proletariat is the first cause of slavery in all its forms: social misery, intellectual mediocrity, and political dependence;

 

That the privileges of the bourgeoisie are guaranteed by political Power, which it relies on to dominate the proletariat;

 

The Socialist Party declares that it has for aspirations:

1. The possession of political Power by the working class;

2. The transformation of individual and corporate property into property that is collective, social, or common. . . .[9]

 

Given his premises, Iglesias' entire strategy was: organize the working class!  By organizing economically in unions, by organizing politically as a party, the workers would gradually acquire the power to defend the rights they already had, to gain new rights, and to transform society.  For this strategy to succeed it was necessary to teach the workers that bourgeois democratic parties did not represent them.  The Republicans, the bourgeois proponents of democracy, were in favor of replacing the Spanish monarchy with a republic.  They were in favor of the rule of law and of guarantees for basic freedoms.  They were in favor of disestablishing the privileges of the church.  But they did not represent the economic interests of the working class.  Monarchists and Republicans alike represented owners, not workers.  From 1909 on Iglesias modified his position and supported a "conjunction" of Socialists and Republicans for the sake of defending the basic freedoms that the workers needed in order to be able to build their organizations.

Against the ideas of the socialists, 19^th-century conservatives argued, in Spain as in other countries, that what the socialists proposed was impossible; consequently, their efforts to achieve their goals could only lead to illusion and trouble, and not to the achievement of their stated aspirations.  Marxist writers have often pointed out that Pablo Iglesias was a public leader, not a theoretician, and that his interpretation of Marx was too simple.

Our own point of view, which we call cultural action or ethical construction, coincides with and overlaps many of the judgments that have already been made about Spanish socialism by its critics and its admirers.[10]  We wish to contribute to ongoing conversations by redefining the issues in terms of certain ancient and medieval ideals--cooperation and sharing--revalorized in the light of a realist philosophy of natural science.  We believe that such a redefinition or conceptual shift will invite dialogue with non-western ideologies as well.  Non-western ideologies often enshrine values similar to those of the ancient West, which the early modern and Enlightenment philosophers undervalued, when they articulated the ideals of western modernity.[11] 

We do not think Pablo Iglesias would disagree with this recasting of the problem and its solutions.  The religious experiences of his early youth were not lost on him, and even though he lost faith in God, he never lost faith in solidarity, in unity.  Nor could he forget the norms that governed his tiny family.  Like so many millions of other poor families, Juana, Pablo, and Manuel cooperated heroically to support one another in a fragmented world.  Iglesias could not have failed to notice the difference between his family's true social bonding and the uncaring attitudes of individuals locked in competitive struggles to survive in a market economy where the poor regularly find that the assets required to satisfy the needs of daily life all belong to somebody else. Throughout his career, words denoting kinship ("brothers," "brotherhood") were never far from his lips.

Nor would Marx necessarily disagree with our recasting.  In 1896, Bertrand Russell delivered in London his lectures on German Social Democracy.  Social democracy was then understood in Germany as a movement broadly following Marx's ideas, although two currents of thought, one mainly inspired by Marx, and the other mainly inspired by Ferdinand Lassalle had come together at Gotha in 1875 to form the German Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands or SPD). Russell explained the aims and ideals of social democracy as follows:

For Social Democracy is not a mere political party, nor even a mere economic theory; it is a complete self-contained philosophy of the world and of human development; it is, in a word, a religion and an ethic.  To judge the work of Marx, or the aims and beliefs of his followers, from a narrow economic standpoint, is to overlook the whole body and spirit of their greatness.  I shall endeavour, since this aspect of the movement is easily lost sight of in the details of history, to bring it into prominence by a brief preliminary account.  Hegel, in his "Philosophy of History," endeavoured to exhibit the actual course of the world as following the same necessary chain of development which, as it exists in thought, forms the subject of his logic. In this development, everything implies and even tends to become, its opposite, as son implies father; the development of the world therefore proceeds by action and reaction, or, in technical language, by thesis and antithesis, and these become reconciled in a higher unity, the synthesis of both. Of this process we have an example in Marx's doctrine of the development of production: First, he says, in the savage and the patriarchal eras, we have production for self; a man's goods and the produce of a man's labour are intended solely for his own consumption. Then, in the capitalistic era, the age of exchange and commerce, people produce exclusively for others; things become commodities, having exchange-value, and destined to be used by others than the producers. This is, in technical language, the negation or antithesis of production for self; the two find their synthesis in the communistic state, in production by society for itself. Here the individual still produces for others, but the community produces explicitly--as in the capitalistic era it produces implicitly--for itself (Russell 1965:1-3).[12]

Russell may have overstated or distorted the influence of Hegel on Marx, but he is surely correct in identifying exchange-value as the key to Marx's analysis of the capitalist era, and in identifying production by the community to meet the community's needs as what, according to Marx, social democracy is supposed to achieve.  Adam Smith, whom Marx greatly respected, had acknowledged that the whole point of economic activity was use, to produce goods and services to supply the necessities and conveniences of life, and that there was no point in exchange for its own sake.  Marx showed that a world ruled by the logic of exchange necessarily failed to do what needed to be done: produce the goods, meet the needs.  He began Capital with an analysis of the exchange of commodities.  He drew a contrast between two kinds of exchange, which he depicted schematically as:

 

C - M - C: Commodities - Money – Commodities; and
 
M - C - M’: Money - Commodities - Money

 

In the first type of exchange, C - M - C, the commodities (the goods, Waren in German) are the beginning and end of the process.  You have something, but you need something else.  You sell what you have for money.  With the money you buy what you need.[13]  The exchange pattern M - C - M’ is in principle different.  You have money, and you want more money.  You buy commodities with your money, but only with what Marx calls the "sly intention" of getting more money back.  This is what Aristotle, whom Marx cites, calls "unnatural" exchange.  Goods that people can use, which satisfy some need or provide some pleasure of convenience, are no longer essential to the purpose.  The real material use of things only plays a role if, when, and to the extent that it contributes to the increase of money.  Money buys a commodity.  Consider that, for example, the commodity purchased is, anticipating Marx's analysis later in the book, labor-power.  But the commodity purchased is by no means la chose qu'on aime pour lui-meme (“the thing one loves for its own sake”).  It is only a step on the way to a future sale--for example, the sale of the products created by the labor power.  The culmination and purpose of the process is more money.

With his contrast between C - M - C and M - C - M’, Marx already established at the beginning of Capital an ethical critique of capitalism.  Looking backward from the advanced perspective of a better society of the future, capitalism will be seen as a rude and backward stage of civilization, during which society had not yet learned how to produce the goods required to meet its needs.  Instead, it produced only a certain subset of those goods, viz. the ones whose production would further the accumulation of capital. 

The M - C - M’ model also serves to introduce points of supreme importance for any transition from capitalism to socialism.  Under socialism, society works to meet its members' needs.  Therefore, by definition, socialism is better than capitalism.  Yet this does not imply that the way to organize society so that it works to meet its members needs has been invented.  The Islands of the Blessed are, by definition, better than the earth, but they do not exist.  Further, in this existing capitalist world, money goes forth to earn more money in the expectation that it will succeed in earning more money, and thus complete a cycle in a chain of accumulation, consisting of links M - C - M’, which repeat themselves over and over.  In the existing capitalist world, it is expectation of profit that makes production start.  Therefore, any step in a socialist direction that weakens the expectation of profit will tend to make production stop.  Fernando de los Rios was an early Spanish socialist who insisted on hammering home this point (1976: 223).[14]

The construction of socialism is a moral problem, although it is not a simple moral problem.  Marx attempted in Capital to improve upon the purely moral arguments for socialism by putting the ideology of the working class on a sound scientific basis.  The C - M - C / M - C - M’ contrast was an opening gambit, which led toward more scientific, less ethical, and ostensibly deeper concepts.  For better or worse, Karl Marx, like many great philosophers before and since, deployed the best and most up to date science of his day in the service of great ideals that seemed to be built on sand, only to have it turn out that the ideals outlasted the science.

Pablo Iglesias was a convinced Marxist, but a born moralist.  His passions for truth and rectitude invite comparisons with Socrates and with Gandhi.  For Iglesias it was supremely important to assert the dignity of working people; to demonstrate that workers are persons, and not zeroes.  A few examples: In 1884 he, along with several others, was sentenced to five months in jail, on flimsy pretexts relating to their having organized a strike of typesetters.  Felipe Ducazcal, a personal friend of both Iglesias and the governor, visited him in jail to tell him that he could obtain a pardon for him.  Iglesias would not accept a pardon, and he served his sentence.  His newspaper El Socialista refused to be sensational or sentimental and accepted the consequence that it would not be a paper with a large circulation.  On another of the many occasions when he went to jail for his beliefs, Iglesias' lawyer sought to defend him by saying that in the rush of meeting a newspaper deadline he had written things he did not fully mean, but Iglesias testified that he had thought the matter over carefully and had meant exactly what he had written.  When first elected to public office, as a member of the Madrid City Council, Iglesias and two other socialists elected with him, became entitled to a share in the spoils system through which council members recommended candidates for municipal employment.  They refused to participate, and instead introduced a resolution (which did not pass) calling for filling all city posts by open competition according to merit.  Their action became a model for other socialists who were later elected to municipal offices in Spanish cities (Carr 1982: 450; Morato 1931: 84, 114-16, 166-79). 

After Iglesias' death, the socialists actually prospered under the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera.  Primo chose to persecute the anarchists and the communists, while seeking labor peace by negotiating with the socialists.  Many labor-management disputes were arbitrated by mixed commissions in which socialist trade unionists spoke for the workers (Payne 1999: 31-33).[15] When Primo finally resigned, in January of 1930, the socialist party and the socialist unions were stronger than ever.[16]  Both were flooded with tens of thousands of new members, who expected even greater gains after the restoration of liberty.

It was not to be.  The history of Spain from the resignation of Primo de Rivera to March 28, 1939, when General Francisco Franco's troops entered Madrid, is the history of the first great failure of Spanish socialism. "The circumstance that made the civil war in Spain inevitable was the civil war inside the socialist party," wrote the Spanish historian Salvador de Madariaga (quoted in de la Cierva 1983: 173).  The Pablistas, led by the philosopher and professor of logic Julian Besteiro, lost control of the party and the trade unions to people who considered themselves more practical, more scientific, more revolutionary, or all three.  This contingent ultimately led the PSOE into a disastrous alliance with people the historian Ricardo de la Cierva described as "the chorus of lunatics into which the Spanish Communist Party had degenerated" (de la Cierva, op. cit.: 109).  Madariaga and de la Cierva are two of legions who have at the time and subsequently diagnosed the malady of Spanish socialism in the 1930s.  Even now, seventy years later, it is our purpose to offer yet another hypothesis.  Spanish socialism in the 1930s failed because it followed an oft-tried and inherently flawed strategy: rather than undertaking the more arduous and more important task of constructing cultural structures of solidarity, the socialists chose to work within existing cultural structures to try to extend greater political and economic power to the rural and urban working classes.  This strategy met with a predictable backlash.

The unquestioned strategy of the PSOE from its founding had been to organize the economic power of the working class through a confederation of trade unions, and to organize the political power of the working class through a political party.  As the party's 1888 "considerations" state, the bourgeoisie uses political power to back up its economic power.  The workers would therefore do the same.  The years 1931-32 should have been an ideal time to move this strategy forward. The return of freedom meant that unions could organize. The socialists held several important portfolios in the post-dictatorship government of the Republican Manuel Azana, and they were in a position to use political counter-pressure when owners used political pressure.  If the basic PSOE strategy would work at all, it should have worked then.

For an illustration of why it did not work, it is helpful to consider not government, party, or union policy, but instead daily life in a Spanish village in the years 1931-32 and afterwards.  In such a village, the socialists used their organized economic power to shift the terms of employment contracts in favor of better wages, hours, and working conditions.  In 1932, the government, which formerly could have been counted on to back the owners, appointed a tripartite commission in the village to arbitrate disputes. One member represented Labor.  A second represented Property.  The third, who turned out to be a local schoolteacher, represented the Government itself.  Conditions were ripe for increasingly organized labor to express its collective power, and this is precisely what happened.  With the socialists in control, landowners were forced to hire workers to work the land under conditions set by workers themselves and their advocates.  Certain results were predictable: farmers lost enthusiasm for farming, and the prices at which crops could be harvested and brought to market were not competitive (Collier 1987: 65-118).[17]  On the hypothesis that the crisis in production that afflicted this particular village was general in Spain, it is easy to understand why it is hard to disentangle, among the mixed motives of those who conspired and murdered to defeat and destroy democracy and socialism, the self-interested motives of preserving property and privilege, from the patriotic motives of saving the nation from chaos and collapse.

Yet we are not making an inductive argument based on a single village.  We are illustrating a recurrent tendency that is inherent in the normative structure of capitalist society.  It follows from Marx's M - C - M’ schema.  When the rational expectation of future profits declines, so does production.  Further, as Marx pointed out, capitalists compete with each other, and those who cannot "get their labor down" (a phrase of a Connecticut mill owner quoted by Marx) are at a competitive disadvantage.  Constructing socialism through the economic and political empowerment of workers encounters constraints that are not helpfully articulated in the language of power at all.  They are better articulated in terms of cultural structures--normative frameworks that should be improved and transformed.

If it is true that power is deeply embedded in the founding metaphors of modern western thought, then we must expect our thesis that economics and politics are best understood in different terms to fall on deaf ears.  Power is not an optional concept. Michel Foucault is not mistaken--even though some of us would say he is limited--when he says, in effect, that we cannot think about power without at the same time thinking in power and with power.  Power is, so to speak, written into the software that programs our minds.

We are making our task of seeking a hearing for a counter-cultural thesis easier by not relying on a single case.  If we fail to convince anyone that the problem of constructing a new social reality in Spain is best conceived in terms of cultural action to transform normative structures, then the case of Sweden provides further evidence, as do the other cases we examine.  With respect to Spain, however, the 1930s is not the best period for showing the dilemmas of social democracies and how to overcome them--because nobody knows what would have happened in the 1930s if democracy and socialism had not been annihilated by brute violence.  Contemporary Spain is a better test case for our hypothesis.

Notes