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235 Conclusion The Republic proved incapable of fighting an industrial war, particularly a trench war, which required massive supplies of food, clothing, materials, and weapons. Although Loyalists inherited initial advantages in resources and industry, their enemies proved logistically superior. The ephemeral Republican victories at Teruel and Ebro and even the defense of Madrid may have boosted morale, but they could not resolve its problems of political economy. Privation caused growing alienation. The Republic was unable to retain the commitment and devotion of the urban dwellers who initially sustained it. Nor did it arouse the enthusiasm of rural populations, including collectivists, who resented its price controls. Historians have often attributed the difficulties of collectives to outside forces, that is, the pressures of the war and the attacks of the Confederation’s political enemies (see Bernecker 1982:130).1 Certainly, without the support of an efficient and united government, it is difficult to see how either agrarian or industrial collectives could have prospered. However, internal divisions among workers themselves compounded political tensions and economic deficiencies. Many, if not most, gave priority to their own needs first and then considered those of communities larger than themselves and their families. Activists devoted to a cause had to confront a relatively selfish rank and file. Village requirements provoked more solidarity than region, republic, or revolution. The degree of commitment declined as the group became bigger or the cause more abstract. 236 Conclusion In striking ways, productivist militants and managers in Spanish collectives came to resemble their Soviet counterparts who, despite the assistance of a powerful and centralized state, also reported problems of motivation and discipline . As in the USSR, many collectivists expressed a strong distrust of all those—in the Spanish case, women, elderly, gypsies, and sometimes even soldiers —who were not considered full-fledged producers. Hoarding goods and information showed that agrarian collectives were not the beehives of solidarity that their apologists have argued. Bartering and black marketeering abandoned many urban residents and much of the Popular Army to hungry fates. The Republic proved incapable of sufficiently mobilizing peasant energies to win its life and death struggle. Its wage and price controls and the indiscipline of its troops backfired by reinforcing agrarian egotisms. A social-historical approach from below shows that the conflict between rural and urban was as consequential for the Republic’s decline as the political disputes, class divisions , and international rivalries, which have been the traditional focus of much Spanish civil war historiography. Some historians have charged that the Western democracies were guilty of appeasement and insufficient antifascism. Thus, they have logically taken the spotlight off internal factors. In their eyes, the Spanish war was a prelude to the Second World War. Their approach has provided insights into the politics and diplomacy of the period. Yet perhaps now it would be more fruitful to see the Spanish war not only in its contemporary international context but also as an example of a civil war in a developing Western nation. Therefore, I have made constant references to and comparisons with the English, French, U.S., and Russian civil wars. My perspective has begun from the foundation block of the individual. Both Marxists and bourgeois have dismissed individualisms as false forms of resistance and have contrasted them with conscious revolutionary activity or conventional political activism.2 The recent emphasis on gender assumes, like class perspectives, an identity that neglects individual dissidence. But this feminist and Marxist dismissal of individualisms ignores fundamental material needs of workers and peasants who, “on the basis of their daily material experience,” were able “to penetrate and demystify the prevailing ideology.” A perceptive Republican soldier concluded from his own war experience, “the most common gauge of collective adventure was personal vicissitudes. In spite of all the messages of massive propaganda—whether written, broadcasted, or painted—that insisted on the common interest, people displayed their sharp individualist edge as though trying to save themselves from the misfortunes of the rest” (Pons Prades 1974:280). No system, whether libertarian communism , socialism, capitalism, or feudalism, has been fully successful in making the subordinate classes, whether male or female, internalize the dominant ideology. Conclusion 237 Self-indulgence and self-interest of the anonymous had major consequences. Flights and retreats of subversive individuals decided battles. As General Rojo pointed out, the indifferent rear triumphed over a supposedly courageous vanguard (Rojo 1974:43).3 Individualisms weakened the infrastructure of trench warfare. The reluctance to build fortifications, resistance to labor, and the acquisitive or entrepreneurial hoarding...

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