LESA Collectivizations

Collectivization was the source of one of the most complex set of realities and debates about the Civil War in Catalonia.  The defeat of the military coup was followed by the start of a revolutionary process in the rearguard, one in which each party and union defended its own model of revolution. On the one hand, the anarcosyndicalists of the FNT-FAI and the heterodix Communists of the POUM advocated a proletarian revolution that emphasized the collectivization of the economy. On the other, the Unified Socialists of the PSUC and the UGT unión organization it controlled, along with liberal republican parties: ERC, ARC, and UR, were less adamant about collectivization and supported the preservation of certain types of private property. When the collectivization began in both the service sector, and especially restaurants, and the industrial sector on 21 July, some were imposed while others were consensual.

The agreement that the CNT, FAI, PSUC and UGT reached on 22 October was adopted by the Generalitat in the Collectivizations Decree it issued two days later. It provided for a mixed economy. Businesses with more than one hundred employees and those whose owners had supported the military uprising were to be collectivized. Those with between fifty and ninety-nine employees could be collectivized if two thirds of the employees were in favor. Finally, enterprises with fewer than fifty employees would remain in private hands but overseen by a workes’ control committee elected by the employees. The UGT and CNT, apparently competing with each other but in fact operating in a coordinated fashion, were charged with carrying out the collectivizations. After the fall of 1937, the Generalitat would also have some role, but always through agreements with the two union organizations.

Collectivizations were most common in the industrial sector, were they affected around half of all enterprises in Catalonia. Metallurgy and machine making exemplified this process, especially given their importance of reconverting peacetime industry to the wartime context. LESA, a collectivized metallurgical firm in the town of Sabadell is an excellent example. Its workers published a magazine to publicize the company’s new collectivist ethos, as this photograph taken from the February 1937 issue shows. Like other collectivized metallurgical enterprises, LESA received support from the Generalitat so that the reconversion would be realized efficiently. By the second quarter of 1937 metallurgical production in Catalonia had surpassed that before July 1936, although this was far from being the case in other sectors of the economy.

The situation in agriculture was much more complicated. The CNT and FAI sought to apply collectivization in a rural world which was dominated by sentiment favouring small and medium-sized properties and where there were many different forms of working privately-owned land. As a result, the Catalan countryside was the scene of much tension and even some armed clashes, as in the municipality of La Fatarella in January 1937 which resulted in fifty deaths. The CNT and FAI succeeded in applying their collectivist models in the southern and westernmost parts of Catalonia where they were dominant, but elsewhere, they barely managed to create one hundred collectives.