THREE YEARS OF THE SPANISH REPUBLIC

Evening Star, Issue 21746, 14 June 1934, Page 5

THREE YEARS OF THE SPANISH REPUBLIC

“ I am not hungry to-day. I ate my cat.” I laughed. I thought he was joking (writes Louis Fischer in the ‘ New Statesman ’). But the Spanish peasant who used these words and the men and women who had gathered around me in the mud hut were quite serious. A woman, aged twenty-seven, who had five living children and -looked forty-five, said: ‘ ‘ Recently a horse iell dead on the road, and we all ran ont to cut off pieces of his flesh.” 'This was in a village thirty minutes by electric car from the much-advertised city of Seville in the province of Andalusia, rich in land and water. At first I had not wanted to go to a place so near a city. My impression would be too favourable to be representative of all Spain. But I found a misery, a destitution and hopelessness, that beggars description. Vet the peasants of Puebla del Bio told me that in the neighbouring village conditions were much worse, and when I spoke of the matter to Spaniards of all classes, they said: “That is nothing. You should go to Extramadura.” The inhabitants of Puebla del Rio were dressed more poorly than the peasants of a bad Ukrainian village. One man told me that he had last eaten meat eight months ago at the funeral of a city friend. “ And butter?” “We don’t know what it means.” Even the children never got milk. I went into a dozen houses and looked carefully for food supplies. In one earthen home I found two small bunches of scallions, four potatoes, a small halffilled bottle of vegetable oil. No bread. No family had sugar. This is not a bad year; it is a normal year. These people and several million more Spaniards live in a permanent state of semi-starvation. Tens of thousands of Spanish peasants inhabit caves and subsist on spinach and grass. Whole districts are known for their underfed cretins. This has jbeen going\on for decades. The most distressing feature is not so much that conditions are horrible, but that nothing is being done to remedy them. 1 have seen misery aplenty in the Soviet Union./ But even the 1933 Ukrainian famine was the concomitant, in part the x’esult—sad paradox—of prodigious efforts now already crowned with considerable success to give the country a now and permanently healthy agrarian base; whereas • -Sixain ♦ »••• •••■>*•- erty stimulates no endeavour to destroy U. The folks I met in Puebla del Bio owned neither horse, nor cow, nor pig, nor fowl, nor sheep. They were agricultural workers who did not even possess enough laud for vegetable growing. This is the situation of the great mass of the Spanish peasantry—completely landless. AH' the soil of Puebla del Rio belongs to three owner# who employ the entire popnluu.o. Employ ? They work about four months a year. One woman’s husband had not earned anything for six months. “We are waiting for death,” a middle-aged peasant replied to my question about the future. The Republic had given them nothing. “Damned Republic! ” one woman shouted. They all wanted land, and the Republic had not given it to them. In other provinces, especially in the north, the problem is not to give some land to landless workers, but to give more land to pensaixts whose holdings are too small to afford them a decent livelihood. The poor have either no land or insufficient land; the feudal master's have too much. Tin Spanish Republic was created in 1931 not merely to destroy the feudal monarchy but to overthrow the feudal land system on which that monarchy rested. Spain needed a French revolution. But the Bepuhlic has failed to make one. The Spaxxish Republic is safe. The issue—monarchy or republic— is dead. Even the Catholic reactionaries seem to be reconciled to it now they see that they can dominate it. But the new Republican shell surrounds a content that lias not changed. The inter-relation-ship of classes ixx Spain is the same now as under Alfonso. The people wanted a social revolution ■ they got only a political revolution. Spain’s crying need is a sweeping land reform. When the Republic came into being, the Socialists and the Liberals led bv Azana 7 attempted to introduce agrarian changes by decree. They were blocked by the landowners and the bourgeoisie. Thereupon Azana, Prime Minister from October, 1931, to September, 1.933, and still regarded by some as Spain’s strong man, set to work on a new land law. They worked at it for a year and a half—meanwhile nothixxg happened. "When Azana told me this I could scarcely suppress a cynical smile. “A year and a-half to draft a law?” “Yes,” he declared, “ but we were busy fighting political and religions enemies. Social problems, had to wait.” The Socialists, too, compromised on vital economic issues in order to safeguard the Republic. And today forces against whom Azana and the Socialists wished to protect it. The Republic, to be sure, has certain achievements to its credit. It raised the wages of agricultural workers and prohibited the importation of cheap Portuguese labour. But Largo Caballero, the Minister of Labour responsible for these improvements, the honoured leader‘of Spanish Socialism, and now called “ The Lenin of Spaixi,” admitted to me that his legislation had only helped the village for a time to eat a little more, but not to accumulate any reserves or to dress or dwell better. And besides, he added, everything that he had done was now wiped out by the Right, which last November wriggled into power with the aid of the votes of the women and of the dead who usually developed a weakness for voting twice. Landed proprietors htfve rudely slashed wages, and are disregarding the Republic’s labour-protect-ing enactments.. What is woi'se, the feudal barons—l met some of them and some of- their monarchist and Fascist scions—are smuggling their money abroad, or speculating in land, or transferring their fortunes to the cities. Vast stretches of land lie idle. Their owners neglect them; the Government does not confiscate them, and meantime the village proletariat suffers for want of jobs. Agriculture languishes and industry consequently cannot grow. The village throws part of its hungry surplus human dregs into the cities, but the cities fail to absorb them. Circumstantial evidence, and the opinions of most authorities whom I consulted, support the conclusion that the Spanish bourgeoisie is unwilling and unable to alter present conditions. Industrialists should be opposed to feudalism ; it means a poverty-stricken, disaffected population which cannot serve as a market for their nxanufacured goods. Yet the Spanish industrial bourgeoisie collaborates willingly with the feudal landowners against the menace of Left Wing Radicalism. They would rather see Spain poor, than see it Socialist. This bloc of the industrial bourgeoisie aud the agrarians, very large agrarians and “kulaks,” ie the

combination now in office. It uses the Prime Minister Lerronx, spokesman of the milder Centre, as a screen. While he shields them from the view of an electorate which might still" resent the spectacle of a Government consisting of violent reactionaries and recent anti-llepublicans, they arc reducing tho Republic to an empty word and consolidating their position in the. Slate apparatus and in other strategic

organisations. Their chief function is to keep the Socialists out of power, “ We will solve the agrarian problem,” a Catalan industrialist, member of tlxe Cortes, said to me, “ without either a French or a Bolsjxevik revolution.” More concretely, his party proposes to give irrigation and credits to present landowners and thus merely reinforce a system of land tenure that has been responsible for Spain’s retrogression.