The labor movement in Spain began in Catalonia in the 1830s and 1840s, although it was during the Democratic Sexenio when it was really born with the founding of the Spanish Regional Federation of the First International (FRE-AIT) at the Workers' Congress of Barcelona in 1870. During the Restoration, the two major Spanish trade union organizations were founded, the socialist Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT, 1888) and the anarcho-syndicalist Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT, 1910), with the latter predominating until the Second Spanish Republic. CNT and UGT were the protagonists of the social revolution that took place in the Republican zone during the first months of the Spanish Civil War. During Franco's dictatorship, the two historical centers were harshly repressed until they practically disappeared. In the final stage of Franco's regime, a new organization called Workers' Commissions (in Spanish: Comisiones Obreras) emerged, which together with the reconstituted UGT, will be the two majority unions from the beginning of the new democratic period until the present day.
Workers' movement up to the Spanish Civil War
Origins (1830-1868)
"Insurrections are as old in Spain as the rule of the Palace favorites against whom they have usually been directed".
Karl Marx, Revolutionary Spain (New York Daily Tribune, Sept. 9, 1854).The origins of the labor movement in Spain are located in Catalonia in the 1830s and 1840s as it was the only place where there was a modern industry, the cotton textile sector. It was there that the first conflicts between workers and employers took place, and it was there that the first union was founded in 1840 —a friendly society as it was called at the time— in the history of Spain, the Barcelona Weavers Association (Asociación de Tejedores de Barcelona). In a letter dated October 17, 1854, Karl Marx wrote to Friedrich Engels:"The careful study of the Spanish revolutions makes clear the fact that they needed about forty years to demolish the material basis of the domination of the priests and the aristocracy, but in that time they succeeded in making a complete revolution in the old social regime".Also in Catalonia, the first general strike took place in 1855, during the progressive biennium —a period of extension of the movement to other areas of Spain— and also in Catalonia the first Workers' Congress met in 1865, followed by another in 1868, the latter held after the triumph of the Glorious Revolution of 1868, which by recognizing for the first time freedom of association put an end, at least momentarily, to the persecutions and prohibitions that incipient workerism had suffered during the previous forty years.
With the formation in Spain of the first two groups of the First International in 1869, one in Madrid and the other in Barcelona, a new stage in the history of the workers' movement in Spain began, in which, as Manuel Tuñón de Lara warns, "for the first time, class consciousness was expressed at a level in which the entire system of production relations, institutions and values was called into question".
Democratic Sexennium (1868-1874)
The First International (originated in London in 1864) was organized in Spain through the Spanish Regional Federation of the IWA strongly influenced by the Bakuninist International Alliance of Socialist Democracy). Thus, the Spanish labor movement had a preponderance of anarchist sectors, as opposed to the socialist preponderance of most of the rest of Europe."In Spain, the International was founded first as a simple appendix of Bakunin's secret society, the Alliance, which was to serve as a kind of recruiting base and, at the same time, as a lever to manipulate the entire proletarian movement. You are going to see now that the Alliance is also openly trying today to put the International in Spain back in the same subordinate position in which it had it before.
Because of this dependence, the peculiar doctrines of the Alliance: the immediate abolition of the State, anarchy, anti-authoritarianism, abstention from all political acts, etc., were preached in Spain as doctrines of the International. At the same time, every prominent member of the International was suddenly included in the secret organization and imbued with the belief that this system of direction of the public association by the secret society existed everywhere and was a matter of course. [...]
In June 1870 the first Congress of the Spanish International was held in Barcelona, where the plan of organization was adopted which was then fully deployed at the Valencia Conference (September 1871), which is in force today and which has already given the best results.
The same as in all other places, the participation that our Association had (on a par with that which was attributed to it) in the revolution of the Paris Commune, also gave preponderance to the International in Spain. This preponderance and the first governmental persecutions, which followed immediately afterwards, greatly increased our ranks in Spain. However, at the time the Valencia Conference was convened, there were only thirteen local federations in the country, apart from some isolated sections in various places. [...]
Immediately after the Valencia Conference, the London Conference was held (September 1871). The Spaniards sent a delegate, Anselmo Lorenzo, and he was the first to bring to Spain the news that the secret Alliance was inconceivable in our Association, and that, on the contrary, the General Council and the majority of the federations were decidedly against the Alliance, for its existence was already known at that time."
Friedrich Engels (1872) "Report of the General Council on the situation in Spain, Portugal and Italy".In 1870 the FRE-AIT had 30,000 members and the Alliance eventually achieved the domination of the Federation, imposing in the Barcelona Workers' Congress of 1870 the anarchist program: to abstain from political activity (not to create a workers' party and not to vote) and the defense of "direct action". Meanwhile, Marxism defended the need for an organized and centralized workers' democracy, and to reach it defended the need for a workers' political party.
Restoration (1875-1931)
The break between Marx and Bakunin occurred in 1872, leaving the Spanish Federation aligned with the latter, without having created any workers' party, which was supplemented with anti-electoral slogans or with occasional support for the federal republicans. Meanwhile, the minority Marxist group tried to fill this vacuum with the creation of the workers' party PSOE in 1879 and the working class union UGT in 1888. It can be said that in Spain there was no Catholic-social movement properly speaking before the encyclical Rerum novarum of Pope Leo XIII in 1891. The exception would be the workers' unions of the Jesuit Antonio Vicent. In 1895, the workers' circles numbered 169 and their membership exceeded 36,000.
With the new 20th century, there was a development of the workers' movement, highlighting the industrialization of Asturias, the Basque Country, and Catalonia. At that time there were also divergences in Spanish anarchism. There were anti-union "purist" currents, currents in favor of individual terrorism and finally there were anarcho-syndicalist currents, based on the theory of revolutionary syndicalism coherently formulated by French revolutionary theorists.
It was in Spain where anarcho-syndicalism managed to create a true mass force. In 1907 the trade union confederation Solidaridad Obrera was founded in Barcelona, of anarcho-syndicalist tendency, and which published an organ of expression of the same name, a newspaper popularly known as the "Soli". With the economic recession of 1908-1909, faced with layoffs and wage reduction, the "Soli" raises the possibility of a general strike. With the call-up of recruits for the war in Melilla, this strike broke out. The result: the Tragic Week of Barcelona.
The anarcho-syndicalists, with control of the "Soli", call a National Workers' Congress in Barcelona in 1910. They agreed to create the CNT (National Confederation of Labor), which would become the main mass union of the Spanish working class until the civil war, surpassing the UGT. Composed of unions "without ideology" in principle, they have little organizational discipline, trying to avoid the promotion of the strike as an economic weapon to stop the "direct action". The anarcho-syndicalist or revolutionary syndicalist character of the CNT was clear.
This trade union center, if in the State as a whole it surpassed the UGT, in Catalonia it became almost the only center (especially important because Catalonia was the largest Spanish working class region). The CNT and the UGT had an almost exclusively working-class character, with very few middle-class intellectuals. Their tone was "coarse" and of a decidedly proletarian anti-intellectualism. And yet, the magazines and libraries that their groupings promoted contributed to the culturization of the working class in those years when public education was conspicuous by its absence.
Although, theoretically, neither partial nor economic strikes were supported, obviously the member unions of the CNT were immersed in them. If the CNT union, in its rank, had not supported these mobilizations, it would never have been a mass union. It was the class instinct of the class militants which prevailed over the theorizations of "the leadership". Evidently, the assembly and federalist character of the organization allowed each federation of the confederation, at the sectoral or local level, to make the decisions it saw fit.
Industrial strikes were spreading through the north, peasant strikes through Andalusia at the end of the 1910s. This was the atmosphere in which the triumph of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia was received. The Spanish working class, like the world working class, was very impressed with the victory of the Soviet Bolshevik revolution. The impact on the PSOE and the UGT is quite well known, leading to the creation of the first Spanish Communist Party; but not so much is insisted on the fact that it produced great sympathy among the confederal milieus, with the CNT becoming affiliated to the III International for a time.
The fact that the Soviet republic functioned in those times through the workers' assemblies or "soviets", allowed the Spanish anarcho-syndicalists to see in it the incarnation of their collectivist ideals. The place where the CNT had most influence, Catalonia, had the most active part of the middle class and the most powerful part of the workers' movement. Bourgeois Catalanism pressed hard, and feared at the same time the strength of the workers.
At the end of the 1910s, the bosses organized throughout Spain against socialism and revolutionary syndicalism. The police were overwhelmed by the workers' movement. Many workers saw individual anarchist terrorism as a provocative maneuver to justify police persecution and repression. The "white" terrorism of the bosses' pistoleros made matters worse.
The growth of the economy of neutral Spain in World War I strengthened the working class and the CNT. In 1917-18 there was an increase in strike activity. The government banned the "Soli" (Solidaridad Obrera, official organ of the confederation), closed workers' centers and arrested leaders. In 1919 there was a strike at the electric company "La Canadenca", which spread and produced a general strike in Catalan industry and the countryside. Partial victory of the CNT, after a hard fight. And the mobilization was important: on March 24, 1919 the CNT again called a general strike to free the prisoners of the previous strike. There were three weeks of social struggle in Barcelona and other cities.