Rebel Worker Book Review "Saragossa Bound: A Chronicle of the Durruti Column"

Zaragoza Bound: A Chronicle of the Durruti Column
Roberto Martinez Catalan
AK Press

“On to Saragossa” was the rallying cry for the anarchist militia advance from Barcelona into Aragon at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. “Zaragoza Bound, a Chronicle of the Durruti Column,” is ostensibly an account of this. Except it’s not. Its focus is largely on key gaps in anarchist thinking as seen from outside and from inside the militia. Martinez Catalan sees these gaps as having had fatal consequences for the organization and conduct of the war, leading ultimately to the failure of the revolution. He suggests that any future attempt at a libertarian reorganization of society requires a rethinking of anarchist theory.

This book is organised around a study of the Durruti Column, an anarchist led militia formation that was formed in the first days after the defeat of the military rising in Barcelona. The Durruti Column immediately set out for Zaragoza/ Saragossa, the major city in the province of Aragoo. This city was a CNT stronghold, where the military uprising had been successful. Unlike rural Catalonia, anarchist and CNT (National Confederation of Labour, the anarcho-syndicalist trade union) influence was strong in rural Aragon. As the anarchist militias moved through villages on its march to Zaragoza, most villages set up collectives to share the land.

For Martinez Catalan at least two elements are essential to a politics that aims at a successful revolution. One is the question of the forms of military organization necessary to win a civil war, and the other is the question of the State. Both are questions of power. For Martinez Catalan the Spanish anarchists’ deep antipathy to militarism and the State left them floundering for ad hoc solutions to unavoidable and predictable problems.

The CNT was the largest union in Spain, and strongest in the “cinturon rojo y negro”, the belt of working class suburbs around Barcelona, where most workers were members of the anarcho-syndicalist trade union. According to George Orwell, it was as common there to be a member of the Anarchist Federation as to be a member of the Labour Party in Britain. The large scale takeover of Barcelona factories and enterprises under different forms of workers’ control isn’t dealt with in this book. The focus is on what Martinez Catalan sees as the key issues of Army and State, issues that he argues the anarchists were theoretically unequipped to deal with. Following the experience of the militias, there is discussion of the rural collectivization in Aragon.

How deep anti-militarism went in the anarchist and CNT rank and file cannot be underestimated, and this antipathy is central to the issues that Martinez Catalan identifies. Durruti, the leader of the Column, made regular broadcasts to the militia units. These were concerned overwhelmingly with the issue of functional discipline in an egalitarian and ant-authoritarian militia. There was no saluting or saying sir, and no privileges of rank. The militia was organized in groups of ten, and these were in turn organised into groups of a hundred. There were regular meetings by elected delegates from both levels. This largely followed CNT union practice. These delegates took part in higher level meetings with Durruti and an ex-army artillery sergeant who worked with Durruti as military advisor.

Simone Weil, serving with the Durruti Column’s International unit, summarizes a Durruti broadcast: “discipline, discipline, again discipline” The idea here was self-imposed (and group pressure imposed) regulation of behaviour. This meant following orders in combat, keeping discussion on organization and different approaches to the war for rest time and the regular delegates meetings. The anarchists opposed coercion, relying on argument and an egalitarian ethic of cooperation and sharing. The question was how far a military unit could be organized along these lines. Martinez Catalan argues that, while the Durruti Column was regarded by opponents as the most disciplined of the militias, there was an uneasy acceptance of what he sees as a “necessary” compromise that anarchist theory could not encompass. He points out that, while there was an absence of traditional military coercion, there was still coercion. Offenders dismissed from the Column were sent back, walking, to Barcelona.

Durruti felt that it was essential to work for the quickest victory, which meant the liberation of Zaragoza; if the war continued it would destroy the chance for a libertarian revolution as it hardened and brutalized those engaged in it. Speaking of relations between the militias and the peasants of Aragon, Simone Weil noted at the time “Without any insolence or brutality – or at any rate I saw none - … there was a gulf between the armed men and the unarmed populace, a gulf like the one between the poor and the rich. There was always something humble, submissive and fearful in the attitude of some and the swagger, lack of care and condescension coming from the others”.

Durruti opposed and tried to stop the killings of “fascists” (usually large owners) that often occurred when the Column reached a village, which was usually collectivised by acclamation after some discussion. This rural movement, partly conscious anarchist, partly the poorest sections in the village seeing value in the change to collectivization (with at least some feeling coerced), was then organized under the Council of Aragon. This consisted of Barcelona anarcho-syndicalist militia leaders, its purpose was to organize and control the rear guard. While often seized on as an example of revolutionary organization, it was largely what any regular army would have done. There doesn’t seem to have been any movement to bring the Council under the control of the collectives.

There were different levels of involvement in the collectives. Matinez Catalan reproduces (in his notes) diary entries made at the time by Simone Weil:
“Conversing with the peasants of Pina. Are you all agreed on farming together? First response (over several occasions); Whatever the committee says will be done. Old man: Yes provided that we are given everything we need and I am not all the time straining to pay off the carpenter, the doctor, the way I am now… Another said: We will have to see how everything works out… Would you rather farm together or divide things up? Yes (but none too categorically)… to the militians these impoverished and magnificent Aragonese peasants, bearing their degradation with such dignity, were not even items of curiosity.”

Franz Borkenau (The Spanish Cockpit) describes visiting a collective village where there were two cafes, one for the collectivists and one for the individualists (this was a negative anarchist term for small owners, not individualist anarchists). This was an ongoing situation that would continue developing, maybe going one way or the other, with the collectivists dominant, but might also have kept a large amount of tolerance for individual choices that did not involve the labour of others.

George Orwell, serving with the POUM (Workers Party of Marxist Unification) militia unit, aligned with the anarchists on the Aragon Front, recounts an incident that shows how deep the anti-authoritarian ethos ran in the CNT rank and file. This was the case even in those who had taken the POUM rather than the anarchists as their political direction. The bulk of the rank and file POUM militia members were from the CNT. For Orwell the POUM militia was as close to a fully egalitarian society as possible in wartime. Orwell noted that, despite egalitarianism, orders were supposed to be obeyed in the POUM militia. When he tried to drag a militiaman who refused to do guard duty to his post, Orwell was surrounded by militiamen calling him a fascist. When Mary Lowe and Juan Brea, attached to the international section of the POUM, described Durruti’s funeral, they pointed out that, while the Communists marched like automatons, and the anarchists were consciously all over the place, they felt that the POUM marched in a proper, democratic fashion. Because, they summed up, “We were all cenetistas”.

Marinez Catalan draws crucial lessons from the anarchist experience through examination of the decisions made and how they were made. He sees their failure as built into the theoretical perspectives of the anarchist militants, those who dedicated their lives, up to and after the civil war, to struggle for an egalitarian and libertarian socialism. He argues “...the lesson of the failed Spanish Revolution… might be summed up as the inescapable obligation to take political power and establish some sort of a democratic revolutionary government, complete with its corresponding specialist armed agencies – army or police, or howsoever one might prefer to label them – unless one was prepared to doom the revolution to defeat in advance; in the early stages at any rate.”

The “in the early stages at any rate” contains the problem. What form of revolutionary government will deny itself continuing power? One that could is the Workers Councils system, dismissed by Martinez Catalan. Taken as the body holding the sole right to determine the use of force, in this meeting Weber’s core definition of the state, it is still the form of organization that can be brought under the most direct control of the rank and file. It can coordinate rather than order, depending on the extent to which it stays, or progresses, under rank and file based control.

Martinez Catalan argues for the necessity of a clear anarchist recognition of the need for some form of State (regardless of what it may be called). The book includes a critical discussion of the Friends of Durruti group (who were not actually friends of Durruti), which called for a revolutionary junta and a new revolution during the 1937 May Days fighting in Barcelona. Unfortunately there is nothing on the Italian volunteer Camillo Berneri’s advocacy for Workers’ Councils, which he carried on in the militias though his paper Guerra di Classe until his murder. Just before the May Days he was shot (either by Stalinist or Italian Fascist agents) after making a radio broadcast on the death of Antonio Gramsci.

Martinez Catalan is dismissive of the idea of an anarcho-syndicalist organization as an alternative to the State. He emphasizes Durruti’s position that the CNT would liberate Zaragoza, even refusing POUM support in an assault on Zaragosa, arguing that the CNT was sufficient in itself to free Zaragoza and proclaim Libertarian Communism.

Both Durruti and Garcia Oliver, two of the foremost militants of the FAI (the Iberian Anarchist Federation) always speak of revolution as the CNT taking over as the form of transition to libertarian communism. However, for them this had to be a CNT with their views of how the revolution could be made. The period from the FAI’s formation in 1929 to the military uprising in 1936 was a period of seeking and establishing FAI dominance within the CNT.

The history of FAI dominance of CNT conferences, of the expulsion of the BOC (later to form the POUM) and the Trientistas from the CNT, is what is missing here. The Trientistas, lifelong anarcho-syndicalists, were opposed to the FAI’s insurrectionary tactics. They argued for building the CNT as a mass organization aimed at a libertarian revolution. Expelled from the CNT together with the local union sections that supported them, they asked what was the goal of the trade union? They declared revolution, and so were revolutionary syndicalists. But then asking themselves what kind of revolution, they declared a libertarian revolution. They called their organization the Libertarian Syndicalist Federation, and worked to reunite the CNT and develop internal democracy. The history of the rise of FAI substitutionism is as much an issue as what was done with it.

Lenin, arguing with Bukharin on trade union autonomy, said “Everything from below is the anarchist way. But doesn’t comrade Bukharin see that if the workers could vote on everything they might vote to do away with socialism?” This is indeed the core position which distinguishes anarchism from other approaches. Some of the problems Martinez Catalan examines come from too much rather than too little departure from this.

Zaragoza Bound is a book with a lot of worthwhile information and challenging arguments. It’s a book where the notes are an essential part of the book, containing more nuanced forms of the main arguments and extensive and valuable passages from many first hand accounts.

However, for these very reasons, this isn’t the best first book to read on the Spanish Revolution. George Orwell’s ‘Homage to Catalonia” gives a better feel for the situation where, according to Orwell, the working class was in the saddle, and why that mattered. The Trotskyist Felix Morrow’s “Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Spain”, written at the time, gives a fair, critical account of what happened. Ronald Fraser’s oral history “The Blood of Spain” and Chris Ealham’s “Class, Culture and Conflict in Barcelona 1898-1937” give modern academic accounts that capture the lived experience of the war and revolution.

Despite these reservations, this is a valuable book, especially for anarchists. Its argument against anarchist views (which he often dismisses as anarchist dreams) of alternatives to the State, can lead to difficult conclusions. The flaw in the argument however is that it makes the differences between forms of overall social power appear irrelevant in the face of the need for a State. For Martinez Catalan there is no alternative. Yet the radical democracy of the Workers’ Council system is such an alternative. One consistent with enabling the development of libertarian and democratic goals. One that can fail, but also one that can succeed.
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