The power from bellow: joint committees and sindical unions during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939).

Abstract

This paper is aimed at studying the different joint committees between the UGT (General Union of Workers) and the CNT (National Confederation of Labour) organized during the Spanish Civil War in Republican territory, especially after 1939, the less-studied period so far. By the beginning of 1938, UGT and CNT encouraged syndical unions through the establishment of intelligence bases which, one month later (on the 18^th of March), configured the formation of the UGT-CNT National Joint Committee. This implied a reinforcement of popular power in a moment of maximum difficulty for the government of the Socialist leader Juan Negrín. The President expected to lift the morale of the population both in the front and in the rearguard with an action from below in order to be able to continue his policy of staunch resistance against the Republican parties and wide sectors of his own party and labour union who considered that, given the negative evolution of the war, it was time to propose surrender. The committee tried to spread throughout all the territories and productive sectors, but in many cases these committees finished in the hands of Izquierda Socialista (Socialist Left) or caballeristas the most important critical sector within the PSOE, led by the labour unionist of the UGT and ex-President Francisco Largo Caballero. This forced Negrín to distance from this ‘power from bellow’. The communists, his main allies, had no interest in creating a working-class power where the PCE was not represented at all. The FAI did not make things easier to their anarchist colleagues in the CNT.