Secondly, as to the after-effects of the fighting. Obviously it is impossible to say with any certainty what these were. There is no evidence that the outbreak had any direct effect upon the course of the war, though obviously it must have had if it had continued even a few days longer. It was made the excuse for bringing Catalonia under the direct control of Valencia, for hastening the break-up of the militias, and for the suppression of the POUM, and no doubt it also had its share in bringing down the Caballero Government. But we may take it as certain that these things would have happened in any case. The real question is whether the CNT workers who came into the street gained or lost by showing fight on this occasion. It is pure guesswork, but my own opinion is that they gained more than they lost. The seizure of the Barcelona Telephone Exchange was simply one incident in a long process. Since the previous year direct power had been gradually manoeuvred out of the hands of the syndicates, and the general movement was away from working-class control and towards centralized control, leading on to State capitalism or, possibly, towards the reintroduction of private capitalism. The fact that at this point there was resistance probably slowed the process down. A year after the outbreak of war the Catalan workers had lost much of their power, but their position was still comparatively favourable. It might have been much less so if they had made it clear that they would lie down under no matter what provocation. There are occasions when it pays better to fight and be beaten than not to fight at all.
Thirdly, what purpose, if any, lay behind the outbreak? Was it any kind of coup d’état or revolutionary attempt? Did it definitely aim at overthrowing the Government? Was it preconcerted at all?
My own opinion is that the fighting was only preconcerted in the sense that everyone expected it. There were no signs of any very definite plan on either side. On the Anarchist side the action was almost certainly spontaneous, for it was an affair mainly of the rank and file. The people came into the streets and their political leaders followed reluctantly, or did not follow at all. The only people who even talked in a revolutionary strain were the Friends of Durruti, a small extremist group within the FAI, and the POUM. But once again they were following and not leading. The Friends of Durruti distributed some kind of revolutionary leaflet, but this did not appear until 5 May and cannot be said to have started the fighting, which had started of its own accord two days earlier. The official leaders of the CNT disowned the whole affair from the start. There were a number of reasons for this. To begin with, the fact that the CNT was still represented in the Government and the Generalidad ensured that its leaders would be more conservative than their followers. Secondly, the main object of the CNT leaders was to form an alliance with the UGT, and the fighting was bound to widen the split between CNT and UGT, at any rate for the time being.
Thirdly – though this was not generally known at the time – the Anarchist leaders feared that if things went beyond a certain point and the workers took possession of the town, as they were perhaps in a position to do on 5 May, there would be foreign intervention. A British cruiser and two British destroyers had closed in upon the harbour, and no doubt there were other warships not far away. The English newspapers gave it out that these ships were proceeding to Barcelona ‘to protect British interests’, but in fact they made no move to do so; that is, they did not land any men or take off any refugees. There can be no certainty about this, but it was at least inherently likely that the British Government, which had not raised a finger to save the Spanish Government from Franco, would intervene quickly enough to save it from its own working class.
The POUM leaders did not disown the affair, in fact they encouraged their followers to remain at the barricades and even gave their approval (in La Batalla, 6 May) to the extremist leaflet issued by the Friends of Durruti. (There is great uncertainty about this leaflet, of which no one now seems able to produce a copy. In some of the foreign papers it was described as an ‘inflammatory poster’ which was ‘plastered’ all over the town. There was certainly no such poster. From comparison of various reports I should say that the leaflet called for (i) The formation of a revolutionary council (junta). (ii) The shooting of those responsible for the attack on the Telephone Exchange. (iii) The disarming of the Assault Guards. There is also some uncertainty as to how far La Batalla expressed agreement with the leaflet.
I myself did not see the leaflet or La Batalla of that date. The only handbill I saw during the fighting was one issued by the tiny group of Trotskyists (‘Bolshevik-Leninists’) on 4 May. This merely said: ‘Everyone to the barricades – general strike of all industries except war industries.’ In other words, it merely demanded what was happening already.) But in reality the attitude of the POUM leaders was hesitating. They had never been in favour of insurrection until the war against Franco was won; on the other hand the workers had come into the streets, and the POUM leaders took the rather pedantic Marxist line that when the workers are on the streets it is the duty of the revolutionary parties to be with them. Hence, in spite of uttering revolutionary slogans about the ‘reawakening of the spirit of 19 July’, and so forth, they did their best to limit the workers’ action to the defensive. They never, for instance, ordered an attack on any building; they merely ordered their followers to remain on guard and, as I mentioned in Chapter IX, not to fire when it could be avoided. La Batalla also issued instructions that no troops were to leave the front.* As far as one can estimate it, I should say that the responsibility of the POUM amounts to having urged everyone to remain at the barricades, and probably to having persuaded a certain number to remain there longer than they would otherwise have done.
Those who were in personal touch with the POUM leaders at the time (I myself was not) have told me that they were in reality dismayed by the whole business, but felt that they had got to associate themselves with it. Afterwards, of course, political capital was made out of it in the usual manner. Gorkin, one of the POUM leaders, even spoke later of ‘the glorious days of May’. From the propaganda point of view this may have been the right line; certainly the POUM rose somewhat in numbers during the brief period before its suppression. Tactically it was probably a mistake to give countenance to the leaflet of the Friends of Durruti, which was a very small organization and normally hostile to the POUM. Considering the general excitement and the things that were being said on both sides, the leaflet did not in effect mean much more than ‘Stay at the barricades,’ but by seeming to approve of it while Solidaridad Obrera, the Anarchist paper, repudiated it, the POUM leaders made it easy for the Communist press to say afterwards that the fighting was a kind of insurrection engineered solely by the POUM. However, we may be certain that the Communist press would have said this in any case. It was nothing compared with the accusations that were made both before and afterwards on less evidence. The CNT leaders did not gain much by their more cautious attitude; they were praised for their loyalty but were levered out of both the Government and the Generalidad as soon as the opportunity arose.
So far as one could judge from what people were saying at the time, there was no real revolutionary intention anywhere. The people behind the barricades were ordinary CNT workers, probably with a sprinkling of UGT workers among them, and what they were attempting was not to overthrow the Government but to resist what they regarded, rightly or wrongly, as an attack by the police. Their action was essentially defensive, and I doubt whether it should be described, as it was in nearly all the foreign newspapers, as a ‘rising’. A rising implies aggressive action and a definite plan. More exactly it was a riot – a very bloody riot, because both sides had
