worker resistance to “social” reform and the rise of anarchism in spain, 1880–1920

WorkerResistanceto“Social”Reformandthe

RiseofAnarchisminSpain,1880^1920

Jesus de Felipe-Redondo, University of La Laguna

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the relationship between the labor movement and the state in

Spain. Its main object of analysis is unionized Spanish workers’ indifference or hos-

tility to state intervention in labor relations during the period when the first set of

social reforms was discussed and implemented (1880–1923). The article shows that

unionized workers’ and reformist politicians’ contradictory attitudes toward social

reforms derived from their irreconcilable perspectives about the nature of labor con-

flicts and the role of the state. These attitudes were in turn based on different no-

tions of “society” (contractual and organic) that prefigured the actions workers and

reformists took to deal with labor conflicts. In analyzing this issue, the article builds

from the main results of recent studies on the rise of “the social” and examines a

heterogeneous array of primary sources (including union manifestos, official inquir-

ies, and intellectual and political debates about social laws).

T his article examines the relationship between the labor movement and

political authorities during the rise of social reformism in late nineteenth-

and early twentieth-century Spain. In particular, I explore unionizedworkers’

widespread attitude of reluctance and even hostility toward social reforms. In Spain,

Many thanks to the editors and reviewers for their insightful comments, to Miguel A. Cabrera, Geoff Eley,

William Sewell, Margaret Somers, and the participants in the European History Workshop at the University

of Michigan and the Spanish History Symposium at the University of California at San Diego for their

generous advice on earlier drafts of this article, and to the Fulbright/Spanish Ministry of Education Program

for Postdoctoral Researchers and Fundacion Espanola para la Ciencia y la Tecnologıa (FECYT) for their finan-

cial support.

Critical Historical Studies (Fall 2014). © 2014 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

2326-4462/2014/0102-0003$10.00

255

as in other Western countries, debates about social reforms divided the labor move-

ment in the late nineteenth century. In most countries unionized workers even-

tually accepted and supported state intervention, but opposition to social leg-

islation became mainstream in the Spanish labor movement, feeding a growing

anarchosyndicalist current that was consolidated in the 1910s.1

Workers’ reluctance to embrace social reforms was caused by a clash between

different rationales about the role of the state. According to recent studies of liberal

governmentality, social legislation was the outcome of a fundamental change in

the liberal conception of political governance that took place in Europe during

the second half of the nineteenth century. The crucial development was the emer-

gence of a social political rationale, different from the individualist liberal rationale

that had prevailed until then—and that never disappeared completely. The new

rationale led political elites to explain labor conflicts as “social problems,” that is,

as conflicts originating in the development of modern industrial productive forces

and their effects on society—such as proletarianization, poverty, and demoralization.

The solution adopted by political elites to deal with those social problems was state

regulation of labor issues—that is, social reforms.2

The reformers assumed that introducing various forms of social welfare would

reshape workers as new objects/subjects of governance who would learn to respect

the social and political order. This new social political rationale cannot be regarded

as a specifically “bourgeois” ideology. Bourgeois interests did not drive the internal

logic that fixed the objectives and the scope of social reforms; indeed, most Spanish

employers radically opposed the reforms. Rather, the social political rationale was a

product of European political and intellectual debates. To understand Spanish work-

ers’ resistance to reforms that would seem, on the surface, to be favorable to them,

1. Historians have referred to Spanish anarcho-syndicalism as the “particularity” of the Spanish labor

movement. Here I do not deal directly with the controversial question of historical exceptionalism. Rather, I

focus on the political rationalities that shaped the relationships between the labor movement and authorities

and on their explanatory relevance for understanding the causes of workers’ resistance to social reforms. On

Spanish anarcho-syndicalism, see Julian Casanova, Anarchism, the Republic and Civil War in Spain: 1931–1939

(London: Routledge, 2004); Paul Heywood, “The Labour Movement in Spain before 1914,” in Labour and

Socialist Movements in Europe before 1914, ed. Dick Geary (Oxford: Berg, 1989), 231–65; Edward Malefakis, “A

Comparative Analysis of Workers’ Movements in Spain and Italy,” in Politics, Society and Democracy: The Case of

Spain, ed. RichardGunther (Boulder, CO:Westview, 1993), 57–69.

2. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, eds., The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Mitchell Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society

(London: Sage, 1999); Patrick Joyce, ed., The Social in Question (London: Routledge, 2002); Nikolas Rose, Powers

of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). On the use of the notion

of governmentality in the Spanish context, see Francisco Vazquez, La invencion del racismo: Nacimiento de la

biopolıtica en Espana, 1600–1940 (Madrid: Akal, 2009).

256 | CRITICAL HISTORICAL STUDIES FALL 2014

we need to grasp the sharply distinct political rationales in terms of which workers

conceived of their interests.

Spanish workers’ responses to social legislation were more hostile than those

of other European workers, but it is important to realize that debates about state

intervention in labor issues occurred in most European labor movements from the

1860s onward. Several studies have shown that workers were generally indifferent

or distrustful until the turn of the century or later. It was prior implementation of

social reforms and a gradual cooptation of union members by new reformist in-

stitutions that eventually encouraged workers to accept the reforms.3 In Germany,

the workers’ interest in social legislation grew after the first social laws were passed

in the 1880s.4 In England, workers who supported state intervention were a minor-

ity until the turn of the century.5 In France and Italy, workers’ lack of interest was

accompanied by blunt opposition to state intervention until the First World War.6

Indeed, antistate intervention movements such as revolutionary syndicalism sur-

vived as secondary trends in many countries.7 But unionized workers in other Euro-

pean countries had generally accepted and participated in social reforms by the end

of the First World War. In sharp contrast, their Spanish counterparts maintained

3. Gøsta Esping-Andersen, “The Emerging Realignment between Labour Movements and Welfare

States,” in The Future of Labour Movements, ed. Mariano Regini (London: Sage, 1993), 133–49; Chris

Howell, Trade Unions and the State: The Construction of Industrial Relations Institutions in Britain, 1890–2000

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007); Theda Skocpol and Dietrich Rueschemeyer, eds.,

States, Social Knowledge, and the Origins of Modern Social Policies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,

1996). On Spain, see Ana Guillen, “El origen del Estado del bienestar en Espana (1876–1923),”

Estudio/Working Paper 10 (1990): 14–19; Feliciano Montero, “De la beneficencia a la reforma social,”

Espacio, Tiempo y Forma 7 (1994): 424, and “Conservadurismo y cuestion social,” in Las derechas en la

Espana contemporanea, ed. Javier Tusell, Feliciano Montero, and Jose M. Marın (Barcelona: Anthropos,

1997), 59–61.

4. Wolfgang Streeck and Kozo Yamamura, eds., The Origins of Nonliberal Capitalism: Germany and Japan

in Comparison (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); Vernon Lidtke, “German Social Democracy and

German State Socialism, 1876–1884,” International Review of Social History 9 (1964): 202–25.

5. Henry Pelling, “TheWorking Class and the Origins of theWelfare State,” in Popular Politics and Society

in Late Victorian Britain, ed. Henry Pelling (London:Macmillan, 1979), 1–18; Pat Thane, “TheWorking Class

and State ‘Welfare’ in Britain, 1880–1914,”Historical Journal 27 (1984): 877–900; Sheila Blackburn, “British

Working-Class Attitudes to Social Reform: Black Country Chainmakers and Anti-sweating Legislation,

1880–1930,” International Labor and Working Class History 33 (1988): 42–69; Stephen Yeo, “Working-Class

Association, Private Capital, Welfare and the State in the Late-Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” in

Social Work, Welfare and the State, ed. Noel Parry, Michael Rustin, and Carole Satyamurti (London: Sage,

1977), 48–71.

6. John A. Davis, “Socialism and theWorking Classes in Italy before 1914,” 182–232; and Roger Magraw,

“Socialism, Syndicalism and French Labour before 1914,” 48–100; both in Geary, Labour; Pierre Rosanvallon,

“Etat et societe,” in L’Etat et les pouvoirs, ed. Jacques LeGoff (Paris: Seuil, 1989), 543–47.

7. Marcel van der Linden and Wayne Thorpe, eds., Revolutionary Syndicalism: An International Per-

spective (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1990).

Worker Resistance and the Rise of Anarchism in Spain | 257

their reluctance until the 1930s.8 Explaining this difference is a central objective of

this article.

I focus not only on the effects of the implementation of social reforms but also

on how unionized workers interpreted them—an issue that has not been fully ana-

lyzed in other studies. My analysis draws from sources in which workers and pol-

iticians set forth their respective views. I examine union newspapers and manifestos,

workers’ answers to officials’ questions, the specific provisions of labor laws, and

official statistical reports. I also use secondary sources that examine the reforms’ ef-

ficacy. In Section I, I present Spanish politicians’ and workers’ attitudes toward

state intervention in the nineteenth century. In Section II, I analyze the (lack of)

relationship between social reforms and workers’ demands between 1900 and 1909

and the workers’ reactions to reform proposals—including the rise of anarcho-

syndicalism. In Section III, I examine how workers’ reactions influenced the de-

velopment of both social legislation and the labor movement in the 1910s and the

early 1920s.

I. INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM AND STATE INTERVENTION

IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

The Spanish labor movement shared important similarities with other European

labor movements in the nineteenth century. The profile of the unionized worker

was essentially the same: a skilled and male worker from industrial sectors (espe-

cially the cotton textile industry) and urban trades such as shoemakers, carpenters,

builders, or printers.9 The first Spanish unions appeared in 1839–43 in Catalonia, the

most industrialized area of the country. Their creation coincided with the rise and

consolidation of unionism in countries such as France and England. As occurred all

around Europe, Spanish unions endured strong repression, while steadily extend-

ing across the main cities (especially Barcelona, Madrid, Valencia, Seville, and Bil-

bao) and industrial towns. At the end of the century, workers from new regions

and sectors joined the movement (miners, dockworkers, rail workers, etc.), although

farmworkers, the biggest group in the Spanish workforce, scarcely participated.10

8. This attitude shaped the Spanish workers’ “political culture” in the twentieth century. See Santos Julia,

“Sindicatos y poder polıtico en Espana,” Sistema 97 (1990): 41–62; and Pere Gabriel, “Republicanismo popular,

socialismo, anarquismo y cultura polıtica obrera en Espana (1860–1914),” in Cultura social y polıtica en el

mundo del trabajo, ed. Javier Paniagua, Jose A. Piqueras, and V. Sanz (Valencia: FIHS, 1999), 211–22.

9. Manuel Perez Ledesma, “La formacion de la clase obrera: Una creacion cultural,” in Cultura y

movilizacion en la Espana contemporanea, ed. Rafael Cruz and Manuel Perez Ledesma (Madrid: Alianza,

1997), 201–33.

10. Genıs Barnosell, Orıgens del sindicalisme catala (Vic: Eumo, 1999); Jesus de Felipe-Redondo, Tra-

bajadores: Lenguaje y experiencia en la formacion del movimiento obrero espanol (Oviedo: Genueve, 2012).


Conversely, the Spanish labor movement was weaker and less articulated on

a national scale than its European counterparts. In 1904, while the main English,

German, and French labor federations reached millions of members, authorities

counted 171,731 unionized workers in Spain.11 These workers were distributed

among small organizations such as theMarxist General Union ofWorkers (Union Gen-

eral de Trabajadores, or UGT), with fewer than 6,000 affiliates in 1888 and 41,000

in 1910, and the anarcho-syndicalist National Confederation of Labor (Confedera-

cion Nacional del Trabajo, or CNT), with 30,000 members when founded in 1910–11.

TheSpanishSocialistParty(PartidoSocialistaObreroEspanol,orPSOE),withroughly

10,000members and one parliamentary deputy in 1910, was one of the weakest in

Europe.12

Despite these differences, there was a remarkable commonality between the

conceptual languages of Spanish and other European labor movements: in the nine-

teenth century, organized workers presented themselves as “free men” and “pro-

ductive citizens” entitled to certain “natural” rights that authorities and employers

had to respect.13 Take, for instance, the most recurrent cause of labor conflict in

Spain: the maintenance of wage levels. Unionized workers perceived wages as the

material expression of two of their “natural” rights: the right to make a decent liv-

ing from their work and the right to own the product of their work.14 This per-

ception did not exist before the creation of the first unions. Indeed, the very emer-

gence of unions was closely linked to the workers’ identity as citizens with “natural”

rights. Spanish workers who created unions demanded recognition of their organi-

11. Instituto de Reformas Sociales, Estadıstica de la Asociacion Obrera en 1.º de noviembre de 1904 (Madrid,

1907), 283. In 1904, 2.1 percent of Spanish workers were unionized. The rate oscillated between 5 and

10 percent in France and Germany and was higher than 12 percent in the United Kingdom. Robert Price

and George S. Bain, “Union Growth Revisited: 1948–1974 in Perspective,” British Journal of Industrial Relations

14, no. 3 (1976): 340; Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850–2000 (Oxford: Oxford

University Press), 75; Alvaro Soto, El trabajo industrial en la Espana contemporanea (1874–1936) (Barcelona:

Anthropos, 1989), 318–19.

12. Manuel Perez Ledesma, El obrero consciente (Madrid: Alianza, 1987), 257–58.

13. For the importance of these notions in the European labor movements, see Richard Ashcraft, “Liberal

Political Theory and Working-Class Radicalism in Nineteenth-Century England,” Political Theory 21 (1993):

249–72; Gareth S. Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832–1982 (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1983); Patrick Joyce, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of

Class, 1848–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991);WilliamSewell,Work and Revolution in France:

The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Margaret

Somers, “Narrativity, Narrative Identity, and Social Action,” Social Science History 16 (1992): 591–630.

14. Barnosell, Orıgens; Albert Garcia Balana, “‘El verdadero productor:’ Lenguaje y experiencia en

la formacion de las culturas polıticas obreras,” in Historia de las culturas polıticas en Espana y America

Latina, vol. 2: La Espana liberal, ed. Marıa Sierra and Marıa C. Romeo (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2014);

Felipe-Redondo, Trabajadores.


zations as the result of their “natural” freedom to associate in order to defend their

rights in the workshops. The first rules of Spanish unions stated that workers were

“citizens equal to the employers” and that employers had to respect their rights.15

This argument articulated organized Spanish workers’ demands until the twentieth

century.

Unionized workers also considered employers to be free individuals who par-

ticipated in the labor process. The cause of labor conflicts, in their view, was that

some employers behaved as “selfish citizens,” abusing their economic position in

order to impose their interests on the exchange of labor regardless of employees’

rights. Asserting a classical liberal argument, workers argued that the only way

of solving this problem was via the exercise of their freedoms. As the representa-

tives of the Catalan unions argued in 1855, freedom “limited itself”: “Its boun-

dary lies in the freedom of the next individual: the worker’s freedom bound by the

manufacturer’s, and the manufacturer’s by the worker’s.”16 Workers considered

unions as legitimate organizations because they were the outcome of their freedom

to associate in order to prevent abuses and bargain over labor contracts on an equal

footing with the owners. Unions were the solution to protect their rights within

the free market context. As the organized cotton weavers from Barcelona stated,

to solve labor conflicts “it was enough” to exercise the “rights that nature . . . has pro-

vided us with.”17

These notions of “individual freedoms,” “natural rights,” “equality,” and “cit-

izenship” were the conceptual pillars of the liberal regime. They also formed the

conceptual framework through which workers made sense of their world, con-

stituting their interests and experiences and shaping their actions. This frame-

work explains why Spanish (and other European) workers did not ask political

authorities to regulate labor negotiations, at least in the way political authorities

attempted to do at the turn of the century. Workers interpreted state interven-

tion as an “interference” of the state in the sphere of individual freedoms and as a

way of disregarding their independence in defending their own interests.18 They

15. [Estatutos de la] Sociedad de Mutua Proteccion [de Tejedores de Barcelona] (Barcelona, 1840).

Arxiu Historic Municipal de Vic. Lligall Documents i papers de l’Asociacion de Tejedores de Vich.

16. Joaquın Molar and Juan Alsina, Observaciones acerca del proyecto de ley sobre la industria manufacturera

(Madrid, 1855), 5.

17. Diario de Barcelona (December 22, 1841), 5244.

18. The term “interference” was used by Catalan union representatives in Las clases trabajadoras aso-

ciadas a los Diputados a Cortes y en particular a los de la antigua Cataluna (Barcelona, 1841), 217–18.


rejected the few proposals for state regulation of labor contracts that were debated

in the nineteenth century, as happened with the Manufacturing Industry Bill of

1855. Catalan unions’ representatives declared before the Spanish Parliament that

unionized laborers did not want special protection: “[We] want neither more nor

less rights from the state than other citizens. The state does not quench our thirst,

satisfy our hunger, clothe our bodies, or provide us with a home for the disabled.”

Any attempt at regulating labor conditions faced “the insurmountable limit of the

ownership of the individual over himself.” Only “the interest, either collective or

individual, of employers and workers” could “naturally” dictate “the contracts.” As

the associated Catalan weavers declared in 1869, workers did not want a hateful

“privilege of protection” that distinguished them from other citizens.19 What they

wanted was the recognition of their right to associate and to create boards to ne-

gotiate labor contracts with employers.20

It is true that European workers sometimes demanded the intervention of the

authorities in their conflicts. Spanish workers also did this several times, but, on

most occasions, they only wanted the authorities to make employers respect pre-

vious pacts and existing labor conditions that owners wanted to change.21 The logic

of this claim is not the same as the logic that articulated unions’ demands for labor

laws in the twentieth century. In the second case, unions asked for state regula-

tion in order to preserve workers’ rights from the dangers of an intrinsically unfair

free market. In the nineteenth century, however, they demanded the recognition

of their autonomy to defend their rights within the framework of the free market.

Organized workers expected authorities to guarantee the agreements negotiated by

free individuals and their associations—despite owners and authorities consider-

ing collective negotiation to be an attack on individual freedoms. This was the “pro-

tection” they demanded in conflicts such as those in Barcelona in 1854–56, when

19. Molar and Alsina, Observaciones, 8–9; La Federacion, September 19, 1869, 3–4.

20. On unionized workers’ attitudes toward political authorities, see Genıs Barnosell, “¿Un reformismo

imposible?,” 217–62; and Albert Garcia Balana, “Trabajo industrial y polıtica laboral en la formacion del Estado

liberal,” 263–313; both in Estado y periferias en la Espana del siglo XIX, ed. Salvador Calatayud, Jesus Millan, and

Marıa C. Romeo (Valencia: Universitat de Valencia, 2009).

21. The cases of demands for explicit state intervention of labor conditions were rare. In 1873, the

Manufacturing Union (Union Manufacturera), the federation of industrial workers from Catalonia, asked for

regulation of the working day, women’s and children’s participation in the workforce, and the minimum

wage among other demands. However, they affirmed that freedom to associate was the main solution to

social conflicts, while other measures were secondary. See “Exposicion de la Union Manufacturera a las

Cortes” (Barcelona, August 5, 1873), http://www.veuobrera.org/00fine-x/um-expo.htm.


many employers tried to change labor conditions in several sectors—especially,

but not only, the cotton industry. During the “selfactinas conflict” (1854), asso-

ciated spinners asked for the support of local authorities in order to prevent the in-

troduction of self-acting mules into the factories. They argued that these machines

were introduced without negotiation and negatively affected their labor conditions

and their rights as free individuals.22

In most labor conflicts, organized Spanish workers demanded that authorities

protect the workers’ right to associate. Indeed, they interpreted the lack of recogni-

tion of this right as an intolerable intervention of the state in the sphere of personal

freedoms, an experience of oppression of their “natural” rights. This experience urged

them to create clandestine unions and to carry out spectacular actions, such as the

first general strike in Barcelona in 1855. As occurred in France, England, and sev-

eral German and Italian states, this attitude led workers to provide backing to

democratic political movements that supported or at least tolerated unions, espe-

cially during the radical revolutionary periods of Spanish history (1840–43, 1854–

56, and 1868–74). Links between Spanish unions and democratic republicanism

strengthened from 1854 onward, when many workers became republicans and

republican organizations helped create popular associations, including unions. The

main points of the republicans’ social program were the legal recognition of unions

and the creation of negotiation boards, certainly not social reforms of the kind

implemented from 1900 onward.23

In the second half of the nineteenth century, new ideological trends such as

cooperativism (1860s), anarchism and Marxism (1870s–1880s) appeared in Spain.

As happened in France, England, and Italy, anarchism and Marxism were relatively

weak in Spain and did not oust previous union demands or the republican incli-

nations of many workers until the end of the century.24 These currents combined

with existing unionism in trying to lead workers toward new objectives, but they

faced many obstacles. Many unionized workers participated in several of these

tendencies at the same time, despite their apparent ideological contradictions. Anar-

22. See Josep Benet and Casimir Martı, Barcelona a mitjan segle XIX, vol. 1 (Barcelona: Curial, 1976),

375–81.

23. Roman Miguel, La pasion revolucionaria (Madrid: CEP, 2007); Ramiro Reig, “El republicanismo

popular,” Ayer 39 (2000): 83–102; Florencia Peyrou, Tribunos del pueblo (Madrid: CEP, 2008); Jesus de

Felipe-Redondo, “La orientacion del movimiento obrero hacia el republicanismo en Espana en el siglo

XIX (1840–1860),” Historia y Polıtica 25 (2011): 119–48.

24. Davis, “Socialism”; Magraw, “Socialism, Syndicalism”; Linden and Thorpe, Revolutionary Syndi-

calism.


chist and Marxist leaders complained about the lack of ideological commitment of

organized workers and of the “ineffectiveness” of their demands, but many of these

leaders maintained important links with republicanism and participated in unions’

struggles.25

The main response of Spanish (and European) authorities to the workers’ de-

mands was repression.26 Repressive policy was based on a widespread perception

that organized workers were “immoral” subjects.27 Authorities recognized workers

as citizens with the same civil rights as other citizens. However, since workers were

poor, politicians considered them to be dependent individuals. Poverty was per-

ceived as a sign of social subordination to “emancipated” citizens, that is, owners.28

Property became the fundamental criterion of social and political division and exclu-

sion in liberal regimes during the nineteenth century. According to liberal thought,

property was the result of individual work. Once civil rights and individual free-

doms were guaranteed, individuals would gain access to property through their own

work and personal sacrifice. This was one of the basic expectations that drove the

installation of liberal regimes all around Europe.29

In this view, poor individuals were those who did not take advantage of their

freedom in order to emancipate themselves. The existence of the poor was con-

sidered problematic since, according to liberal theories, all individuals had the nat-

ural instinct to escape from poverty. How was it possible that productive individuals

rejected such an instinct? Liberal politicians argued that either poor workers were

“incapable” because of their lack of natural abilities or that they were selfish, lazy

individuals who took advantage of other citizens’ work. In both explanations, work-

ers’ social conditions were largely irrelevant because politicians trusted the capa-

bility of every individual to overcome such conditions.30 The second explanation

25. Antonio Lopez Estudillo, “El anarquismo espanol decimononico,” Ayer 45 (2002): 73–104.

26. Fidel Gomez, “Problemas sociales y conservadurismo polıtico durante el siglo XIX,” Historia

Contemporanea 29 (2004): 591–621; Gonzalo Capellan, “Cambio conceptual y cambio historico,” Historia

Contemporanea 29 (2004): 539–90; Andres Hoyo, “Economıa polıtica versus polıtica economica,” in Las

mascaras de la libertad: El liberalismo espanol, 1808–1950, ed. Manuel Suarez Cortina (Madrid: Marcial Pons,

2003), 203–27.

27. On the origins of this conception, see Mary Poovey, “The Production of Abstract Space,” in

Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830–1864 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995),

25–54.

28. Pedro Trinidad, “Trabajo y pobreza en la primera industrializacion,” in Historia de la accion social

publica en Espana (Madrid: Ministerio de Trabajo, 1990), 101–35.

29. See Pierre Rosanvallon, Le sacre du citoyen: Histoire intellectuelle du suffrage universel en France

(Paris: Gallimard, 1992).

30. On the origins of these two explanations, see Mitchell Dean, “A Genealogy of the Government of

Poverty,” Economy and Society 21 (1992): 215–51; Giovanna Procacci, Gouverner la misere: La question sociale


is especially relevant here. If poverty was a result of individual immorality, then

liberal authorities had to make sure that poor citizens learned to use freedom

properly. From their perspective, workers who did not accept free market rules

and promoted collective agreements were misusing their freedoms and limiting

other individuals’ rights. Politicians considered moral confusion or perversion (and

also ideological manipulation) to be the causes of this conduct. They adopted a re-

pressive strategy, frequently accompanied by reminders to workers that the only

paths to escape from poverty were personal sacrifice, hard work, and frugality.

However, and despite their obvious differences, state repression and workers’

actions were based on the same crucial assumption about collective relations: the

liberal notion of society as aggregate of free individuals who negotiated private

contracts. For both workers and authorities, the relations among these individuals

were private and therefore excluded from institutional regulation. This means

that they shared a common language through which they made sense of labor

relations. Where they differed was the crucial issue of how to articulate this lan-

guage. For the government, workers’ laziness and egoism caused poverty and labor

struggles, and so unions must be repressed. For the organized workers, the main

cause was employers’ selfishness, and so unions were a legitimate solution. Thus,

both perspectives understood conflict as a result of the lack of morality of individ-

uals. In this view, labor and social conditions—that is, class belonging—did not de-

termine individuals’ interests and labor conflicts. Rather, individual immorality, ei-

ther on the part of employers or workers, was the fundamental reason for labor

struggles. Accordingly, both perspectives designed solutions to correct this individ-

ual conduct, although they were aimed at different individuals. The main objective

of repression and collective negotiation was to transform workers and employers,

respectively, into “good” citizens. The same liberal rationale underlay both strate-

gies of action.

This framework of interrelated liberal concepts (citizen, natural right, society

as an aggregate of free individuals) is essential in understanding workers’ attitudes

toward a drastic political change that began in the 1880s. In 1883, several years

after the consolidation of the Restoration regime (1875–1923), the Spanish govern-

ment created a committee to study “the most relevant issues for the improvement

or well-being of the working class.” Its goals were to find new measures in order

to “protect” the “less-favored citizens” and to “remove the obstacles” that hindered

en France (1789–1848) (Paris: Seuil, 1993). On Spain, see the studies quoted in n. 26 and Fernando Dıez, La

sociedad desasistida (Valencia: Diputacio de Valencia, 1993).


workers “from accessing those facilities that every citizen is entitled to demand and

governments must provide.”31 This idea that workers were “weak citizens” entitled

to legal protection would become the fundamental pillar of social reforms.32

Although repression was never abandoned, this represented an important trans-

formation in political strategies regarding labor conflicts. Before the 1880s, the idea

of state intervention in labor relations was anathema for Spanish politicians. In their

view, the state could not meddle in relations between (formally) free and equal cit-

izens and workers were not “weak citizens.” The reason for this change lies in the

debate about poverty and social conflicts, known as the “social question.” In the

decades that followed the implementation of the first liberal policies in the 1830s,

it became more difficult to argue that the recognition of individual freedoms was

ameliorating the lives of most citizens. It was clear that most workers had not im-

proved their condition—which, in some cases, had worsened due to industrializa-

tion. Furthermore, the labor movement had spread around the country, putting

the efficacy of repressive methods into question. Between the 1860s and 1880s, op-

timism about the liberal regime faded in Spain (and Europe). Many intellectuals

and politicians began to think that the liberal regime not only had not solved labor

conflicts but also was one of their causes.33

In this context, a group of European analysts challenged the prevailing expla-

nations about the nature of the labor movement. In Spain, these intellectuals were

grouped into several currents inspired by European trends: hygienists, social econ-

omists, Krausists (followers of the German philosopher K. C. F. Krause), and social

Catholics.34 Despite their differences, they coincided in establishing a new causal

connection between economic development and labor conflicts. They argued that

the labor movement derived from workers’ bad living and labor conditions, which

31. Gaceta de Madrid, December 10, 1883, 761–63.

32. The committee elaborated the first projects of Spanish social legislation, becoming the Commit-

tee for Social Reforms. See M. Dolores de la Calle, La Comision de Reformas Sociales, 1883–1903 (Madrid:

Ministerio de Trabajo, 1989).

33. On the failure of expectations and the emergence of the notion of the social, see Jacques

Donzelot, L’invention du social: Essai sur le decline des passions politiques (Paris: Seuil, 1994); Miguel A.

Cabrera, “The Crisis of the Social and Post-social History,” European Legacy 10 (2005): 611–20; Miguel

A. Cabrera and Alvaro Santana, “De la Historia Social a la Historia de lo social,” Ayer 62 (2006): 165–

92; Procacci, Gouverner la misere.

34. Some of the most renowned Spanish reformists at the turn of the century were the Krausists J.

Sanz del Rıo, F. Giner de los Rıos, G. de Azcarate, and A. Posada; the hygienists and precursors of

Spanish social medicine A. Larraz y Cerezo, H. Hauser, L. Comenge, M. Martın Salazar, and F. Rubio

Galı; and the social Catholics A. Vicent, J. Maura y Gelabert, R. Rodrıguez de Cepeda, and S. Aznar.

Other important authors will be quoted in the following pages.


were the result not only of workers’ immoral conduct but also of defective social

and economic organization. These intellectuals affirmed that the free market and

industrialization had brought economic progress but had also hindered workers’

emancipation and caused labor strife. In this view, labor conflicts were the expres-

sion of “social problems,” produced by the development of capitalist relations that

brought poverty and demoralization to workers. This allowed these intellectuals to

explain the spread of the labor movement despite repression. For if the labor move-

ment was a consequence of social causes, and not of the workers’ immorality, then

it was largely immune to pure repression. In order to put an end to it, it was nec-

essary to act on these social causes.35 These intellectuals identified and studied the

social and labor conditions that supposedly damaged workers, such as the use of

new machines (and the risk of accidents they involved), the establishment of low

wages and long workdays (and the subsequent lack of time for education), and the

mixture of workers of different sexes and ages in the workshops. They concluded

that these circumstances weakened workers’ moral and physical abilities to achieve

emancipation, transforming them into weak subjects. To counteract these weaken-

ing effects, analysts suggested implementation of reforms to protect workers. For

this reason, these intellectuals were called “social reformists.”

A new notion of society pervaded the works of social reformists. For them, soci-

ety was not an aggregate of equal individuals who freely negotiated contracts among

themselves, but a complex organism in which individuals and authorities wove in-

tricate relations whose nature and development was substantially independent

from individuals’ actions. In this organicist view, society was made up of differ-

ent social groups or “organs” that were related to each other and played a critical

role in its maintenance. From the classical Krausist perspective, the development of

society depended on the coordination of these organs of the social body: institu-

tions, social organizations, and individuals. The malfunction of any of them affected

the others. Since workers were recognized as one of these vital organs, their hard-

ships became problems that endangered the survival of the whole society, the “na-

tion,” and the “race.”36 For this reason, the state had to intervene in social organi-

35. On the emergence of the social explanation in Spain, see Miguel A. Cabrera, “El reformismo social

en Espana (1870–1900),” in La ciudadanıa social en Espana: Los orıgenes historicos, ed.Miguel A. Cabrera (Santan-

der: Universidad de Cantabria, 2013), 23–50; M. Dolores de la Calle, “Sobre los orıgenes del Estado social en

Espana,”Ayer 25 (1997): 127–50.

36. On the organicist conception in Spain, see Vazquez, Invencion del racismo. On the emergence

of the “social body” as an object of knowledge and intervention, see Poovey, “Production of Abstract Space,”

37–52.


zation in order to soften workers’ hardships. Praxedes Zancada Ruata, one of the

defenders of social reforms in the 1900s, wrote that the state had to “protect the

normal development of the generations [and] to avoid by all means the excessive

work and imprudent use of the human forces that degenerates the physical fea-

tures and moral feelings of the race.”37

This new notion of society guided the creation of the governmental committee

in 1883, which included representatives from all Spanish reformist currents. In the

next section I will explain why Spanish politicians adopted the theses of social re-

formism, but first I examine the workers’ reactions to this new initiative. In 1884 the

committee invited labor associations (including semiclandestine unions) to express

their views on labor conflicts, working conditions and social reforms. Workers’

opinions about these issues had been completely irrelevant until then. They be-

came significant because reformists considered them useful for discovering the so-

cial causes of labor conflicts.

However, most unions did not send representatives. They argued that free-

dom to associate and collective negotiation were the solutions to their problems,

and that state intervention was irrelevant or even counterproductive. The leaders

of the most important labor federation of this period, the Workers’ Federation of

the Spanish Region (Federacion de Trabajadores de la Region Espanola, or FTRE),

declined the invitation and argued that emancipation only came from the workers’

efforts, not from the state.38 Most workers who provided information shared this

opinion. As the worker collaborators from La Coruna (Galicia) declared, “the group

most concerned in the enhancement of the working class is the working class it-

self and no one can do it better than this class.” Workers could not wait for “an im-

provement that the state surely cannot provide.” The only thing the state could do

was to recognize unions and collective bargaining (5:40).39 In explaining this per-

spective, “Delegate Aymat,” from the Society of Stonemasons of Madrid, stated that

laborers and owners were “men” with equal “natural rights.” Aymat presented him-

self as representative of “the most numerous and organized trend” in the Spanish

labor movement, one that disagreed with anarchists and Marxists on the issue of

social reforms. He affirmed that workers were “convinced that the rights of man

37. Praxedes Zancada Ruata, El trabajo de la mujer y el nino (Madrid, 1904), 23. Zancada Ruata was a

lawyer influenced by Krausist ideas who advocated the regulation of the work of women and children.

38. These leaders were anarchists, while most FTRE members were not, although all of them seemed

to agree on this point. See Lopez Estudillo, “Anarquismo espanol,” 86–89.

39. The workers’ answers are reedited in Santiago Castillo, ed., Reformas Sociales (Madrid: Ministerio

de Trabajo, 1985). The references to the volume and pages of this work are in parentheses in the text.


are natural and born with the human being” and that “the most important thing

is that we can exert our rights in freedom” (1:130–31). For Aymat, workers and em-

ployers were “indispensable agents that need each other.” Social harmony would

come from respecting individual rights, which would allow capital and labor to

“be balanced through the right procedures and the principles of justice” (1:134–35).

In order to obtain this, the state had to recognize the right to associate and to create

mixed arbitration boards ( jurados mixtos) (1:114–16).

These workers were interpreting the committee’s new political initiatives through

the lenses of the conceptions previously analyzed. These conceptions led them to

distrust or have low expectations of social reforms. Aymat did not reject the pos-

sible advantages of social policies for workers but underlined their secondary char-

acter compared with unions and collective negotiation—a perspective shared by

some unions since 1873. Other workers’ representatives also agreed that the work

of women and children, who were not considered independent citizens, had to be

regulated somehow, but they did not clarify whether they wanted the state to do it

(1:59–60, 107). These attitudes were shared by workers in countries such as En-

gland, who used very similar arguments—they interpreted state regulation as “in-

terference” in the individuals’ private relationships.40 However, most unionized Eu-

ropean workers eventually accepted state intervention in the first decades of the

twentieth century, while a majority of their Spanish counterparts maintained their

reluctance. In order to understand this difference, it is necessary to analyze how

Spanish workers perceived the implementation of social reforms.

II. REFORMISM AND THE LABOR MOVEMENT

IN THE AGE OF SOCIAL REFORMS

Between 1900 and 1923, successive Spanish governments regulated numerous

labor conditions and provided economic protection for workers. The adoption of

reformist theses as new principles of governance entailed a change toward a so-

cial political rationale. This change was a consequence of politicians’ perception

that achieving public order was increasingly difficult. In the 1890s, a growing

group of politicians from the two main ruling parties (conservative and liberal)

assumed that repressive policies could not break the thriving labor movement.

Some specific events led these politicians to this realization, such as the enfran-

chisement of male workers in 1890, which brought to the fore the problem of the

lack of integration of (male) workers into the political regime despite the recog-

nition of their political rights; the May Day demonstrations in Madrid and Barce-

40. See esp. Thane, “Working Class.”


lona from 1890 onward; the constant efforts by anarcho-syndicalists and socialists

to organize labor federations, and an impressive national wave of strikes and union

organization in 1899–1903. This wave of labor strife coincided with the political

crisis of the “Disaster of 1898” (derived from the loss of the last Spanish colonies)

and the impact of the so-called Regenerationist movement, which hastened the

implementation of social reforms as a way of regenerating Spanish society.41

In this context, politicians began to adopt social reformists’ analyses and solu-

tions. They began interpreting the labor movement as a social phenomenon, caused

by the contradictions generated by modern economic and social organization, and

they accepted the need to intervene in social relations. According to this logic, once

the workers had better living and working conditions, the labor movement would

moderate its claims and ultimately disappear. In Zancada Ruata’s words: “Only re-

cently has the Spanish state intervened in the relations between capital and labor,

and due to the [previous] lack of a conciliatory power . . . the war . . . is steadily

increasing in intensity. [Peace will arrive only] when the worker feels protected,

when the interventionist criterion takes control of every branch of civil and eco-

nomic activities, regulates their development and accommodates their purposes

to justice.”42

Spanish politicians began to debate the social reforms adopted in other Euro-

pean countries, especially the social laws promoted by Bismarck in Germany since

1883. In 1890, conservative leader A. Canovas del Castillo interpreted them not as

“arbitrary socialism,” as many politicians did at that time, but as a “far-sighted con-

cept of the political needs created by the helplessness of the old economic princi-

ples [the free market and the laissez-faire doctrine] and the direction of the new

science [social economy], the unrest of the proletariat, and the current electoral

system.”43 In the following years, other political leaders (F. Silvela, E. Dato, and

J. Canalejas) followed Canovas and eventually passed the first labor laws.

41. On the origins of Spanish reformism, see Cabrera, “Reformismo social.” Spanish politicians

shared the perspective of their European counterparts. See Davis, “Socialism,” 191; Magraw, “Socialism,

Syndicalism,” 55–67; Howell, Trade Unions, 59–79; Roy Hay, “Employers and Social Policy in Britain: The

Evolution of Welfare Legislation, 1905–1914,” Social History 2 (1977): 435–55; Jane Jenson, “Paradigms

and Political Discourse: Protective Legislation in France and the United States before 1914,” Canadian

Journal of Political Science 22 (1989): 245; Gerhard Lehmbruch, “The Institutional Embedding of Market

Economies: The German Model and Its Impact on Japan,” in Streeck and Yamamura, Origins of Nonliberal

Capitalism, 50–58; Miriam H. Pereira, “The Origins of the Welfare State in Portugal,” Portuguese Journal of

Social Science 4 (2005): 3–26.

42. Zancada Ruata, Trabajo de la mujer, 24–27.

43. Antonio Canovas del Castillo, Problemas contemporaneos (Madrid, 1890), III, 507. On the German

case, see George Steinmetz, Regulating the Social: The Welfare State and Local Politics in Imperial Germany

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992).


A common historical interpretation maintains that social reforms were es-

sentially a defensive reaction to the labor movement on the part of liberal pol-

iticians.44 To this interpretation, it is necessary to raise two essential objections:

(1) social reforms were not merely an answer to the strengthening of the labor

movement but also a consequence of interpreting this movement as a social prob-

lem, and (2) such reforms were implemented to solve those situations that re-

formists, not workers, judged the most urgent. Reforms were definitely not the

outcome of workers’ pressure on the state, both because Spanish unions were

weak and because most of them did not demand these reforms. Those who did,

mainly the socialists, were a minority with little influence. Furthermore, in cre-

ating the new laws, politicians did not follow workers’ demands. Associated work-

ers fought to exercise their “natural” rights, a matter of “justice” derived from their

recognition as free citizens. Reformist politicians, on the other hand, perceived work-

ers’ claims as socially motivated, that is, as the expression of social maladjustments

that had to be alleviated. When they talked about “social justice,” they thought of

social adjustments and not of a deep change in labor relations. From their per-

spective, unions’ complaints were relevant only because they were symptoms of

the sickness that affected the social body, not its cure. The real remedies were re-

formist proposals. For this reason, politicians clarified that they were not guided

by the workers’ criteria. As the senator Alberto Bosch argued, “We do not want

to make socialist acts; we want to make social laws.”45

The lack of correspondence between reformism and the labor movement is clear

in the first set of reforms passed between 1900 and 1909. These laws offered protec-

tion against labor-related accidents (1900), regulated participation of women and

children in the workforce (1900), implemented the Sunday rest (1904), subsidized

worker retirement (1908), created mechanisms of labor reconciliation (1908), and

recognized unions and strikes (1909). As we will see, most of these measures did

not correspond with the workers’ main demands, and even those that seemed to

address such claims had different aims.

Spanish unions had complained about accidents in the workplace since the

1850s, blaming the selfishness of employers who obliged them to work in

dangerous conditions. The majority of unions affirmed that collective negotiation

44. This interpretation is mainstream in most studies on Spanish social reforms, including the ma-

jority of those quoted here. However, recent studies have called this interpretation into question by

insisting on the crucial role played by reformist ideas and the emergence of the notion of the social. See

Guillen, “Origen”; Calle, “Sobre los orıgenes”; Montero, “De la beneficencia”; Cabrera, La ciudadanıa social.

45. Diario de Sesiones del Senado (December 22, 1899), 1767.


would solve this problem. Socialists asked for a protective law in the 1880s, but

the act passed in 1900 disappointed them.46 Politicians were not inspired by the

socialist proposal but rather by other countries’ recent laws—especially the French

1898 Accident Act.47 Labor accidents were reformers’ first target because they

interpreted them as the most visible and tragic social risk entailed by industrializa-

tion. In the political debates prior to the law’s passing, it was claimed that

accidents were “natural consequences, inherent to industrial exploitation.” The

economic protection that the government implemented was understood as an-

other “production cost.”48 This argument was derived from the notion of “profes-

sional risk,” according to which owners had to assume accident compensation as part

of production costs. However, in this view accidents were not the employers’ fault.

The fault was inherent to the industrial system. Alberto Bosch, president of the

committee of senators that examined the bill, declared: “who is to blame [for the

accidents]? The blame is on the inevitability of things, on industrial risk. . . . [This act]

seeks a guarantee in favor of the worker against industrial and professional risk; it

does not seek the responsibility of the employer.”49 Thus, and as happened in

other European countries, the idea of professional risk emerged in the reformist

debate over how the risks of economic organization transcended citizens’ private

interests and legitimated state intervention.50

The second reform focused on regulating or forbidding the work of women and

children. Many organized workers were in accord with politicians in considering

women and children “weak subjects” who needed protection and whose ideal

place was at home.51 The unions’ solutions to this problem ranged from expelling

women from workshops (as they did in 1868 in Igualada, Barcelona) to equal-

izing wages, so that women could earn more in less time and withdraw earlier

from the workshops (as textile unions from Barcelona demanded since the 1860s).

Most unions negotiated these issues directly with owners in the late nineteenth

46. Socialists asked for “pecuniary liability of the employers concerning accidents at work in any

industry” (El Socialista, March 12, 1886), but they complained that the law did not ensure compensations.

47. Javier Silvestre and Jeronia Pons, “El seguro de accidentes de trabajo, 1900–1935,” in XVI En-

cuentro de Economıa Publica (Granada, 2009), 1–30.

48. “Proyecto de ley presentado por el Sr. Ministro de la Gobernacion sobre accidentes del trabajo

en los establecimientos industriales,” Diario de Sesiones del Senado (December 2, 1899), app. 9, 1.

49. Diario de Sesiones del Senado (December 22, 1899), 1766.

50. Anson Rabinbach, “Social Knowledge, Social Risk, and the Politics of Industrial Accidents in

Germany and France,” in Skocpol and Rueschemeyer, States, 52.

51. See Ubaldo Martınez, Mujer, trabajo y domicilio (Barcelona: Icaria, 1995); Mary Nash, “El mundo

de las trabajadoras,” in Paniagua, Piqueras, and Sanz, Cultura social y polıtica, 47–67.


century.52 The law had different objectives, however: it reduced the workday

of women to eleven hours and prevented them from working on Sundays and

public holidays. These prohibitions affected exclusively young women work-

ing outside of their homes. While it is possible that organized workers saw these

as good measures, they wanted to extend them to all women and to implement

further restrictions. The act also implemented maternity leave without economic

compensation, but although many unions claimed to protect the social function of

“motherhood” attributed to women, this provision was neither frequent nor very

relevant in their demands.53 Subsequent laws about female work shared the same

reformist approach. The “Chair Act” (Ley de la Silla, 1912) required owners of

shops and stores to provide seats to female employees in order to protect the

reproductive capacity of female bodies.54 The law was enacted at the behest of

hygienist studies, not unions. Perhaps the ban on night work for women in work-

shops (1912) was closest to workers’ demands.55 However, legislators aimed to

limit the free market as little as necessary, while protecting women’s moral-

ity, whereas for many unions women were exploited whenever they worked in

workshops and factories.

The government justified the third reform, Sunday rest, with moral and reli-

gious arguments. According to a previous provision passed in 1902, the goal was

to improve workers’ morality through attendance at Sunday masses. Thus, “rather

than for physical rest,” this measure constituted “an indispensable condition for

family life” and “a powerful means of civilization and culture.”56 Meanwhile, unions

fought to decrease the length of the workday in order to protect their bodies and

minds from exploitation. Something similar occurred with the system of subsidies

to workers’ mutual aid associations implemented by the state in 1908. The gov-

ernment tried to achieve social peace by assuring social welfare for workers. As

the intellectual D. E. Aller wrote in 1883, one of the “indirect tools” to avoid work-

ers’ strikes was “to defend the laborer from work crises, providing him the nec-

52. On the case of Igualada, see Jorge Martınez, Moviments socials a Igualada al segle XIX (Barcelona:

Abadia de Montserrat, 1993), 112; and on the beginning of the campaign for wage equality, see

Antonio Gusart, “La mujer y la industria,” El Obrero, August 13, 1865, 181–82. The ban on child labor

gathered some support from the unions, although it also faced the opposition of many workers who

counted on the work of their children to maintain their families.

53. Gaceta de Madrid, March 14, 1900, 875–76.

54. Gaceta de Madrid, February 28, 1912, 565–66.

55. Gaceta de Madrid, July 12, 1912, 94.

56. Gaceta de Madrid, July 27, 1902, 404.


essary resources to compensate for the accidental lack of work.”57 This was the

basis for the development of a voluntary insurance system that would help work-

ers endure the lack of income during certain periods of their life—including re-

tirement, accidents, maternity, and so on. The law included initiatives aimed at

educating laborers about moral values, such as frugality and respect for order.

However, unionized workers did not ask for this system of subsidies, which ex-

plains the slight participation of workers in it—as we will see.

It was only in 1908–9 that social reforms addressed the most important union

demands: the recognition of unions and collective labor negotiations. Unions had

been tolerated since 1887, but their legal status was uncertain and strikes were

forbidden. In 1909, the government repealed article 556 of the Penal Code, which

prohibited workers’ “colligations,” and legalized unions and strikes under the au-

thorities’ supervision.58 However, this alignment with workers’ demands was only

apparent. Politicians accepted the reformist assertion that unions had a social jus-

tification: they were an expression of the social unrest generated by economic prog-

ress. Some reformists argued that unions also helped workers avoid the worst

effects of economic development, so their social value had to be recognized. As

the influential intellectual J. Acebo y Modet stated, associations were “the only

defense of workers against abusive exploitation. . . . We must distribute workers

within powerful professional organizations able to give them happiness and well-

being. If we do not, we shall not resist the justice of socialist claims and will be

dominated by the revolutionary wave.”59

The legalization of unions was a part of a complex strategy of controlling the

labor movement. By letting workers organize themselves following certain legal

principles, such as the respect for social order, politicians aimed to engrain in them

the “true value of freedom” and to moderate their struggles. Thus, unions them-

selves became instruments of social policies: “unions will give [to the workers] a

moral discipline. It has been seen many times that the exercise of power makes

individuals moderate; why should not the same happen with groups? Then society,

walking triumphantly along the path of reforms . . . will drive us to a new organi-

zation of life in which the formidable power of unions, in a more conscious shape

than it has now, will bring us an everlasting social justice.”60

57. Domingo Enrique Aller, Las huelgas de los obreros (Madrid, 1886), 150.

58. Gaceta de Madrid, April 28, 1909, 987.

59. Juan G. Acebo y Modet, Origen, desarrollo y trascendencia del movimiento sindicalista obrero (Madrid,

1915), 134, 136.

60. Ibid., 143.


Politicians established a set of requirements for unions and strikes to be legal.

Authorities supervised unions, their members, and their actions. Associations that

did not meet the legal requirements were forbidden. Workers had to announce

their intention to strike several days in advance and had to attempt reconcilia-

tion methods administered by the state before going on strike. Such methods

were implemented through the creation of Local Committees of Social Reforms

(1904), reconciliation councils, and industrial tribunals (1908). Successive re-

forms broadened the capacities of these institutions until 1923, when a Royal

Decree declared that the main objective of the state was “to establish ways to

make the exercise of the right to strike needless.”61

Thus, these measures were not concessions to workers’ demands but rather

an attempt to control labor struggles. As occurred in other European countries,

social reforms were designed as techniques of governance aimed at transforming

workers into subjects who respected social order in exchange for protection.62

Furthermore, the social logic that guided the reformist project determined the

way politicians and intellectuals interpreted the evolution of labor conflicts. They

considered the decrease of such conflicts in 1905–9 an empirical validation of the

new explanations and policies. In 1909, E. Dato, the minister who provided deci-

sive support to the first reforms in 1900, affirmed that the new laws were bring-

ing social peace.63 Similarly, Acebo y Modet wrote that “with the social reforms . . .

the number of conflicts has . . . diminished for the benefit of the industry and of

national production.”64 Reformists thought that their social premises were “right”:

reforms solved labor conflicts because they acted on their “real” social causes.

Many organized workers did not share this interpretation. In the 1900s, unions’

newspapers echoed the debate that was taking place inside these organizations, es-

sentially the same debate that was taking place in unions all across Europe. While

many workers disagreed with social reforms, others were exploring their possibil-

ities in order to improve their situations. Spanish anarchists and Marxist socialists

were deeply involved in this debate, tending to monopolize it. Socialists were

willing to collaborate with political institutions and to create pressure in order

to assure the observance of the laws and to achieve more ambitious reforms.

They defended state intervention as a way of improving labor conditions and

61. Gaceta de Madrid, August 31, 1923, 898–901.

62. Rose, Powers of Freedom, 80.

63. Eduardo Dato, “El significado y representacion de las leyes protectoras del trabajo,” Revista General

de Legislacion y Jurisprudencia 114 (1909): 5–28.

64. Acebo y Modet, Origen, 143.


of steadily procuring social change. Anarchists, on the other side, rejected social

laws and pointed to the flaws of the new legislation as proof of the manipula-

tive intentions of the state. The manifesto of the anarchist Workers’ Conference of

Madrid in 1900 stressed that when “men” are equal and emancipated from the

“capitalist yoke,” “society will only need natural laws to develop in a regime of

freedom ruled by reason and justice.”65 The methods anarchists defended in

order to achieve this emancipation were “direct action” (a set of activities for

achieving better labor conditions that included strikes, acts of sabotage, and

boycotts) and the general strike.

This debate had obvious ideological connotations, but it also was indicative

of a deeper transformation in the labor movement. The mere possibility of discuss-

ing state intervention challenged basic assumptions of existing unionism. Workers

could not ignore the passing of social reforms that could potentially change work-

ing conditions: they had to adopt a stance toward them. Their previous concep-

tions made workers cautious about reforms but did not necessarily prevent them

from exploring the possibilities of these laws. As a result, a real “war of interpreta-

tions” broke out within the unions. Actions such as strikes and collaboration with

authorities acquired new meanings as proof of either the suitability or the inconve-

nience of labor reforms—as well as a wide range of intermediate positions. In this

context, the influence of Marxist and anarchist creeds among workers grew. Their

supporters poured arguments developed during several decades of theoretical dis-

cussions among socialist currents into the debate.

Most Spanish unions gradually divided into two trends that differed in the

ways they interpreted and dealt with social legislation: those workers attracted

by the possibilities offered by social laws, who gravitated to socialist organiza-

tions (especially the UGT), and those who preferred direct negotiation and bat-

tles, who participated in anarcho-syndicalist organizations. These two different

tendencies progressively consolidated at the same time the first social reforms

were passed.66 The number of UGT members increased from 6,000 in 1896 to

40,000 in 1910, spreading across Madrid and several Spanish regions—although

they scarcely penetrated Catalonia, where unionism had been entrenched since

1840. Anarchists guided several union projects from the end of the century on-

65. Quoted in Xavier Cuadrat, Socialismo y anarquismo en Cataluna (1899–1900) (Madrid: Revista de

Trabajo, 1976), 61.

66. On the spread of these trends, see Pamela Radcliff, “The Emerging Challenge of Mass Politics,”

in Spanish History since 1808, ed. Adrian Shubert and Jose A. Junco (London: Oxford University Press,

2000), 137–54.


ward, especially (but not only) in Catalonia and Andalusia. Although repression

and internal problems prevented its consolidation, anarchist influence on union-

ized workers became strong enough to spread among local and regional labor or-

ganizations. Between 1904 and 1910, Marxists and anarchists fought to control

the most important local union organization, the Local Union Federation of Bar-

celona—reorganizedona regional scale as “Workers’ Solidarity” (SolidaridadObrera)

in 1907. Internal and public statements mixed declarations in favor of either the

new laws or direct action. Eventually, it was the anarchists who, in collaboration

with workers influenced by French revolutionary syndicalism, controlled the orga-

nization—which reorganized on a national scale as the CNT in 1910–11.67

The CNT became the main organization of Spanish anarcho-syndicalism, a com-

plex and unstable mixture of anarchists, revolutionary syndicalists, and unionized

workers without any clear ideological adherence.68 Its influence in the Spanish

labor movement grew because a majority of Spanish workers considered social

reforms a clumsy attempt by the government to control them. This perception

was linked at once to workers’ interpretation of the goals of the reforms and to

their assessment of the reforms’ weak implementation in Spain. Although obser-

vance of social reforms was not very high in most countries, in Spain they were

especially poorly implemented until the 1920s—due to the fierce opposition of

employers and to the relative lack of political will on the part of the govern-

ment. Politicians did not establish sufficient mechanisms to assess and enforce the

law’s observance. Thus, for example, the labor inspectors created in 1906 could

not impose sanctions.69 As labor inspector J. Gonzalez Castro underscored in

1917, “what we need in Spain is not good [labor] laws, but the effective imple-

67. Cuadrat, Socialismo y anarquismo.

68. Antonio Bar, “The CNT: The Glory and Tragedy of Spanish Anarchosyndicalism,” in Linden and

Thorpe, Revolutionary Syndicalism, 119–38.

69. See Alfredo Montoya, Ideologıa y lenguaje en las leyes laborales de Espana (1873–1978) (Madrid:

Civitas, 1992), 71; Juan I. Palacio, La institucionalizacion de la reforma social en Espana, 1883–1924 (Madrid:

Ministerio de Trabajo, 1988), 299; Felix Rubio, “Las Juntas de Reformas Sociales y el reformismo social

en la Restauracion (1900–1924),” Espacio, Tiempo y Forma 1 (1987): 71–80; Soto, Trabajo industrial, 185–

86, 281–85, 625, 645–56; Mercedes Cabrera and Fernando del Rey, El poder de los empresarios: Polıtica e

intereses economicos en la Espana contemporanea (1875–2000) (Madrid: Taurus, 2002), 151–52. European

employers provided a stronger support to social measures. See Hay, “Employers,” 436–37. On the obser-

vance of social reforms in other countries, see Marcel van der Linden, “The National Integration of

European Working-Classes (1871–1914),” International Review of Social History 33 (1988): 306; Michel

Dreyfus, “Mutualite et organisations politiques et sociales internationales (1889–1939),” Vingtieme Siecle

48 (1995): 92–102; Frieda Fuchs, “Historical Legacies, Institutional Change, and Policy Leadership,” The-

ory and Society 39 (2010): 69–107; Donald Reid, “Putting Social Reform into Practice,” Journal of Social

History 20 (1986): 67–87.


mentation of those that already exist.”70 Second, reforms did not entail significant

advantages for workers. Accident and retirement pensions provided small compen-

sations that, initially, were not guaranteed by the state. There were no pensions

for women on maternity leave. As a result, workers’ lack of interest in those laws

was notable. Maternity leave was scarcely implemented before the 1930s. The

National Insurance Institute registered only 1,261 workers for insurance schemes

in 1909 and 78,000 (out of more than 7 million potential beneficiaries) in 1918.71

Third, other reforms simply did not fulfill the workers’ main demands. The

Sunday rest did not end the workers’ mobilization to demand a reduction in daily

working hours. Conciliation institutions were very different from the joint com-

mittees defended by unions and only offered voluntary mediation without bind-

ing decisions. Repression continued to affect many unions that did not meet the

standards of the law of 1909, including those that participated in the CNT. More

importantly, the debate about social reforms and the intentions of the government

drove many workers to interpret repression—especially during the wave of strikes

of 1899–1903, particularly in Barcelona—as a standing contradiction of the new

social policies. All this led workers to interpret social reforms as just a form of con-

trol over the labor movement and to see little reason to believe in the advantages

of state intervention.

In this context, anarchist and revolutionary syndicalist ideas made big gains.

Manifestos from Solidaridad Obrera published in anarchist newspapers began to

underline the inefficacy of labor laws and their relationship to governmental

control: “Labor laws (that are not observed), social reforms (that are not carried

out) . . . and another thousand ways by which the privileged classes want to

protect the worker are only hidden barriers to hinder our direct march toward

our social emancipation.”72 Socialists understood the danger of this interpre-

tation for their own program and continuously criticized the limited reach and

70. Jose Gonzalez Castro, El trabajo de la infancia en Espana (Madrid, 1917). Quoted in Soto, Trabajo

industrial, 253.

71. Alexander Elu, “Las primeras pensiones publicas de vejez en Espana: Un estudio del Retiro

Obrero, 1909–1936,” Revista de Historia Industrial 32 (2006): 38–41; Esther Martınez Quinteiro, “El

nacimiento de los seguros sociales en el contexto del reformismo y la respuesta del movimiento obrero,”

Studia Historica: Historia Contemporanea 2 (1984): 67; Silvestre and Pons, “Seguro de accidentes”; Sonsoles

Cabeza, “Legislacion protectora de la maternidad en la epoca de la Restauracion espanola,” Cuadernos de

Historia Contemporanea 6 (1985): 154–59; Montserrat Carbonell, “Genero y prevision en la Espana del siglo

XIX,” in La prevision social en la Historia, ed. Santiago Castillo and Rafael Ruzafa (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 2009),

137–70.

72. “Manifiesto de Solidaridad Obrera a los trabajadores de Barcelona,” Tierra y Libertad, July 25,

1907, 1.


inefficacy social reforms. In a report to the Institute for Social Reforms (ISR) in

1904, the socialist T. Reoyo stated that the failure of the laws passed in 1900

“makes workers wonder whether they can achieve their fair demands by legal

means, and drives them to use force as advocated by libertarians.”73 Marxists were

losing the battle for hegemony in the Spanish labor movement because social re-

forms seemed insubstantial in the eyes of the majority of workers. The creation

of the anarcho-syndicalist CNT and its spectacular growth was the outcome of

this situation.

Several studies have pointed out ineffective social legislation and the subse-

quent lack of integration of Spanish workers into the political regime as one of

the determining factors explaining workers’ preference for direct action over social

legislation.74 However, these studies have failed to notice that the worker’s in-

terpretation of the reforms derived to a crucial extent from workers’ previous con-

ceptual framework. Mainstream explanations in Spanish historiography are based

on the idea that workers’ interests derived from their class position in the social

structure and opposed them to the owner class. Labor and social conflicts that en-

gendered the labor movement were thus the product of capitalist social relations

and their internal contradictions. According to this view, workers gradually “be-

came aware” of their “objective” class interests and the social causes of their hard-

ships. The result of this process would be the workers’ conviction that only the

state had enough power and resources to transform social structures, which in turn

would make workers recognize the advantages of labor laws. But since most Span-

ish workers did not ask for social laws and many directly opposed them, histo-

rians have considered their attitudes as “anomalous conduct”—as the “Spanish

peculiarity”—and have incorporated supplementary reasons into their explana-

tions. Thus, they have referred to the “weakness” and “immaturity” of the Span-

ish industrial working class and the prevalence of skilled workers who defended

the traditional artisan independence of their trades.75 Some authors have also

mentioned the dissuasive effects of governmental repression, which would have

73. Quoted in Zancada Ruata, Trabajo de la mujer, 220.

74. See, among numerous examples, Jose Alvarez Junco, “La filosofıa polıtica del anarquismo

espanol”, in Tierra y libertad: Cien anos de anarquismo en Espana, ed. Julian Casanova (Barcelona: Crıtica,

2010), 28–29; Cuadrat, Socialismo y anarquismo, 55–56; Heywood, “Labour Movement,” 242; Angel

Smith, “La tradicion subversiva catalana: Oficios y clase obrera en perspectiva comparada,” in En el

nombre del oficio, ed. Vicente Sanz and Jose A. Piqueras (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2005), 329.

75. Manuel Tunon de Lara, El movimiento obrero en la historia de Espana (Barcelona: Laia, 1977);

Antonio Rivera, “Orden social, reforma social, estado social,” in Estado, protesta y movimientos sociales, ed.

Santiago Castillo and Jose M. Ortiz (Bilbao: AHS–Universidad del Paıs Vasco, 1998), 17.


kept Spanish workers away from the state.76 In this explanatory frame, the limited

implementation of social reforms was simply another reason that explains the

Spanish “anomaly.”

In my interpretation, however, the limited implementation of social reforms

has a very different explanatory role. Labor and social conditions (including the

workers’ position in the social structure) are relevant only insofar as workers made

sense of them through a set of historically specific categories—in this case, the

liberal conceptual framework analyzed in Section 1. Thus, if workers were reluc-

tant to embrace social reforms it was because their perception of labor relations

was different from that of social reformists. Workers perceived such relations as

contracts among free and equal individuals, and not because they were unaware

of a supposedly objective social reality. Workers’ identities, experiences, and ac-

tions were determined by the sense that this conceptual framework made of their

world and their place in it and by the expectations about their actions that this

framework generated. From this perspective, a particular situation such as the re-

forms’ inefficacy became significant for workers because it reaffirmed their pre-

vious expectations about the futility of state intervention in labor relations. It

was not the inefficacy in itself, which could be interpreted in different ways, but

the specific meaning it acquired when workers made sense of it through a partic-

ular set of categories. This interpretation reinforced their previous rejection of state

regulation, which they saw as a means of extending state control over free individ-

uals. Spanish anarcho-syndicalism became hegemonic because it was so compat-

ible with the workers’ preexisting conceptual categories and because it there-

fore offered a particularly persuasive interpretation of the failed implementation

of social reforms.

In addition, anarcho-syndicalism shared crucial organizational commonalities

with previous unionism, whichmade it an attractive option for manyworkers.Many

unions could participate in the CNT’s loose organization, which, unlike the UGT’s,

guaranteed them the high level of autonomy they had enjoyed until then. More

importantly, the anarcho-syndicalist emphasis on direct action was appealing for

unions accustomed to dealing directly with employers. The anarchist conception of

laborers as “free individuals” who fought for their freedoms had a deep resonance

among workers who identified themselves as independent citizens. All this con-

tributes to explaining the spectacular success of this current in Spain.77

76. Perez Ledesma, Obrero consciente, 254–55.

77. On the heterogeneous ideological creed of Spanish anarchism, see Jose Alvarez Junco, La ideologıa

polıtica del anarquismo espanol (1868–1910) (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1976).


However, the same conceptions and practices on which existing unionism was

based explain why anarcho-syndicalist organizations were not entirely dominated

by anarchists. Indeed, neither socialist nor anarchist programs displaced the aims

of existing unionism. Socialists could not convince most UGT members to sup-

port their ambitious political reformist program. Anarchists could not prevent

many CNT members from negotiating labor conditions with employers. In the late

1910s, leaders from the syndicalist sector within the CNT, such as A. Pestana and

J. Peiro, defended essentially the same actions carried out by unions in the nine-

teenth century and even tolerated a moderate collaboration with authorities con-

cerning their mediation in labor negotiations with owners.78 Thus, the anarcho-

syndicalist movement represented by the CNT was a complex mixture of perspectives

and programs of action in which previous conceptions were still present—and

sometimes dominant. In fact, from this perspective anarchist and revolutionary

syndicalist ideological influence can be explained as the visible result of the radi-

calization (and therefore, continuation) of previous union conceptions, and not

as the result of a limited development of class structure in Spanish society or a “lack

of maturity” of class awareness among Spanish workers. Unionized workers’ pre-

vious perspectives determined the way in which new labor ideologies such as anar-

chist and syndicalist ideas were interpreted, adapted, and implemented. As a result,

reluctance to adopt social reforms was strengthened, a fact that caught reformist

politicians completely by surprise in the 1910s.

III . SOCIAL REFORMS AND THE RISE OF LABOR CONFLICTS

IN THE 1910S

Just when reformists congratulated themselves for the supposed success of their

reforms, labor conflicts began to increase again. In the 1910s, unions strengthened

and proliferated across the country, especially during the First World War—when

inflation rapidly increased. The CNT and the UGT played a fundamental role in an

unprecedented wave of strikes, including the call for a general strike in 1917 against

the reformist political regime. The effect of the Russian Revolution reinforced rev-

olutionary trends within the Spanish labor movement. The number of strikes grew

until 1920, the most conflict-ridden year before the Second Republic (1931–36).

Labor battles became extremely violent in Barcelona in 1920–23. These conflicts

coincided with the rise of popular mobilization and political strife that began with

78. Casanova, Anarchism, 36–63.


the “Tragic Week” in Barcelona in 1909 and marked the unsettled final years of the

Restoration regime.79

The response of the ruling elites to this accelerated increase in conflicts seems

paradoxical. Rather than recognizing the possible failure of social laws, they inter-

preted new struggles as a result of insufficient regulation. Their conviction that

such conflicts had a social nature led them to propose deeper social reforms. Be-

tween 1919 and 1923, Spain moved to the forefront of countries producing new

social legislation. The eight-hour workday, compulsory retirement, and support

for unemployed workers were implemented (1919), a Ministry of Labor was es-

tablished to monitor the growing set of social reforms (1920), parity boards (comites

paritarios) were created to implement a system of collective negotiation (1922), and

law enforcement was strengthened (labor inspectors were given the authority to

impose sanctions in 1922). The agenda for social reforms changed in ways un-

expected by those who promoted them in the 1900s. The government adopted

union demands such as the eight-hour workday and played a more active role in

labor conflicts. Authorities intervened in the strike by miners from Vizcaya (Basque

Country, 1910), the general strike by Catalan textile workers (1913), and the strug-

gles of the bricklayers from Madrid (1919), making owners and workers negoti-

ate, imposing reductions in the workday, and facing the employers’ opposition.

The new laws were justified by reformist (especially hygienist) arguments. When

legislating the eight-hour workday in the building sector (1919), the government

clarified that “the eight-hour working day is the limit of time ideally recognized

as fair for reasons of hygiene and social morality.” The decree that extended this

eight-hour workday to all kinds of work alluded to the “principles of humanity

and justice,” “hygiene,” and “social morality.”80 Thus, the new reforms were in line

with the previous reformist project, and were not developed according to the logic

of workers’ demands. Workers’ demands were not incorporated (i.e., the author-

ities did not recognize that workers’ solutions “were right”) but assimilated and

adapted to the reformist project of shaping workers as respectful citizens. The same

process occurred in such other countries as Germany, where the workday reduc-

tion came not from union pressure but from the social political rationale through

which politicians explained labor conflicts.81 The new reforms gained support from

79. The “Tragic Week” (Semana Tragica) resulted from popular opposition to conscription for the

war in Morocco. Popular discontent exploded in a general strike in Barcelona that initially gained the

support of anarchists, socialists, and republican parties and was accompanied by anticlerical violence.

See Joaquın Romero, La rosa de fuego: El obrerismo barcelones de 1899 a 1909 (Barcelona: Grijalbo, 1974).

80. Gaceta de Madrid, March 16, 1919, 1016–17, and Gaceta de Madrid, April 4, 1919, 42–43.

81. Rabinbach, “Social Knowledge,” 74–76.


socialists but also generated reluctance among many workers who declined to

take advantage of the laws. Take, for instance, the case of compulsory retirement

benefits (1919). Despite its compulsory nature and the fact that workers did not

have to cofund it (unlike in other European countries), in 1923 this system only

covered 1,330,000 out of 8,000,000 theoretical beneficiaries. The system was also

rejected by many friendly societies that received subsidies because it reinforced

state control of their finances.82

The creation of parity boards also faced workers’ lack of interest. Parity boards

were the official attempt to institutionalize the joint committees demanded by

unions. However, reformists introduced an element absent from workers’ de-

mands: a state representative who voted in labor negotiations. Politicians thought

that the state had to supervise collective negotiations in order to assure social

peace by imposing agreements when they could not be reached by negotiation. As

stated in a royal decree in 1923, the government had to “control” the “conciliatory

steps” in order to guarantee social order.83 Many unions rejected this condition

and preferred to negotiate directly with employers, bypassing the new boards.

According to the ISR, between 1905 and 1933 roughly 55–60 percent of labor

conflicts were solved through collective negotiation, but less than 8 percent through

official institutions.84 Furthermore, the ways in which the laws closest to unions’

demands were passed increased skepticism among workers. Reforms such as the

eight-hour workday were passed only after the outbreak of wildcat strikes. Work-

ers could consider this proof that the government was always lagging behind

unions’ initiative. Socialists bitterly noticed this and blamed the government’s

approach to social reforms. In 1920, the socialist leader J. J. Morato wrote that

the way the state had intervened in previous labor conflicts had confirmed the

opinion of “those who think that direct action is not only essential, but the ‘only

thing.’”85

Indeed, anarcho-syndicalism’s consolidation in the 1910s allowed its organi-

zations and explanations to play a more relevant role in workers’ conduct. Better

82. Pere Sola, “El mutualismo contemporaneo en una sociedad industrial,” in Solidaridad desde

abajo, ed. Santiago Castillo (Madrid: UGT, 1998), 78–79; Elu, “Primeras pensiones,” 42–43 and 56. This

rejection also occurred in Great Britain, France, and Italy. See Linden, “National Integration,” 308.

83. Gaceta de Madrid, August 31, 1923, 898–901.

84. Soto, Trabajo industrial, 535, 326, 486–90. The number of labor agreements reached without

state mediation was likely higher because participating authorities knew the disputes they mediated

better.

85. Quoted in Santiago Castillo, “Todos iguales ante la ley . . .del mas fuerte,” Sociologıa del Trabajo

14 (1991–92): 174–75.


implementation of social laws could not neutralize the spread among workers

of anarchist interpretations of social reformism as a mechanism of social control.

Many workers who were skeptical about social policies considered CNT strate-

gies to be solid alternatives to social reforms. As a result, in 1918–19, while the

UGT had 100,000 members, the CNT reached more than 500,000. The CNT played

a crucial role in the violent conflicts that developed in Barcelona between 1919

and 1923.86

This increasing lack of control of labor conflicts led Spanish politicians to rein-

force state intervention and look for more authoritative ways of implementing so-

cial reforms.87 Indeed, this was one of the causes for the coup d’etat of 1923. In

the Primo de Rivera dictatorship (1923–29), the management of social insurance

was reorganized, the value of retirement pensions was increased, compulsory ma-

ternity insurance and the first labor code were passed, and a corporative struc-

ture to regulate collective negotiation was created.88 These measures were also

accompanied by more intense repression of unregulated labor conflicts. Strikes

were forbidden in 1928 and the CNT was banned from the beginning of the dic-

tatorship. However, this authoritarian approach provoked dynamics such that in

1931, when the Second Republic was proclaimed, CNT membership had grown to

800,000.

Unionized workers’ and political elites’ different perceptions of labor conflicts

encouraged misguided interpretations and actions that reaffirmed the other side’s

perspectives. In trying to achieve social order, social reforms failed to stop labor

struggles and, in addition, involuntarily strengthened the disaffection of many

workers from state intervention. In turn, the growth of labor conflicts led reform-

ist politicians to deepen state intervention even though this invigorated the anti-

reform trends among workers. This dynamic was a fundamental cause of the rise

of anarcho-syndicalism and authoritarian corporatism.

CONCLUSION

This analysis of the Spanish case explains why many workers rejected social

reforms. The methods that Spanish workers and reformist politicians pursued

86. Up to 550,000 workers were represented in the CNT’s Second National Conference held in

Madrid in 1919 (714,000 if counting those who adhered to its agreements). See Bar, “The CNT,” 126.

87. In other countries, the national integration of the working classes during the First World War

favored the acceptance of social reforms. See Eley, Forging Democracy, 123–38.

88. These measures were the basis for further social reforms. In 1931, the Republican government

accepted 32 labor decrees passed during the previous dictatorship. See Montoya, Ideologıa y lenguaje, 206.


to solve labor conflicts diverged because of the different conceptual frameworks

that shaped their political rationalities and calculations. Many workers perceived

their hardships through the liberal conceptual framework predominant in the

nineteenth century, seeing them as a result of a deprivation of their “natural” free-

doms. Consequently, they demanded legal recognition of these freedoms as neces-

sary for their emancipation. Meanwhile, politicians interpreted labor conflicts as

the outcome of internal tensions in the current mode of social organization, and

for this reason they believed the state had to intervene in social relations. The

creation of the interventionist state did not result from the incorporation of the

workers’ demands by the liberal regime. Rather, it implied the implementation of a

new social political rationale based on assumptions about the nature of collective

relations that were sharply different from those of the workers. The social reforms

were an attempt to transform workers into new subjects and objects of political rule.

This clash of different rationalities explains organized Spanish workers’ opposition

to state intervention.

This analysis also makes clear that the efficacy of reforms was one of the main

factors explaining unionized workers’ different attitudes in Spain and other coun-

tries. In Spain, the lack of efficacy of the laws reinforced workers’ previous reluc-

tance, creating an environment for the development of antistate currents. In other

countries, the laws’ observance led many workers to participate (generally from

a critical perspective) in the reformist project and so to incorporate different as-

sumptions. However, the extent of the reforms’ efficacy in itself was not the crucial

factor that led unionized workers to act as they did. Rather, it was the way these

workers made sense of the situation through a specific framework of categories.

In other words, interpretations of the reforms’ efficacy—and the practical implica-

tions of these interpretations—depended on the language that workers were using

to make sense of their world. At the end of the nineteenth century, many union-

ized European workers perceived state intervention as a limitation on their in-

dividual freedoms and autonomy, and they only accepted it as a complement to

their associations and collective negotiations. In many European countries, when

this complementary action contributed to solving some of the workers’ hardships,

workers began to explore its possibilities for fulfilling their goals. This exploration

changed their previous conceptions of social legislation, leading them to support

and try to control its implementation. By contrast, the lack of efficacy of these laws

not only reaffirmed Spanish workers’ reluctance to embrace state intervention but

also radicalized it. The progressive rise of anarcho-syndicalism was the most spec-

tacular result of this rejection within the Spanish labor movement.
