The May Days, sometimes also called May Events, were a series of clashes between 3 and 8 May 1937 during which factions on the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War engaged one another in street battles in various parts of Catalonia, centered on the city of Barcelona.
In those events, libertarian socialist supporters of the Spanish Revolution, such as the anarchist CNT and the anti-Stalinist POUM, which opposed a centralized government, faced others, such as the Republican government, Catalan government and the Communist Party of Spain, which believed in a strong central government.
The events were the culmination of the confrontation between prewar Republican legality and the Spanish Revolution, which had been in constant strife since the beginning of the Spanish Civil War.
Background
The Francoist military rebellion of July 1936 failed in Barcelona, and since then the city, as well as the rest of Catalonia, had been under the control of workers' militias, especially ones associated with the anarchist trade union Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT-FAI) and the socialist trade union Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT). Just after taking the last rebelling barracks, the anarchist leaders met with the President of the Generalitat de Catalunya Lluís Companys. It resulted in the Central Committee of Antifascist Militias of Catalonia being established, the de facto government of Barcelona and Catalonia. It represented most parties from the Front d'Esquerres (the name of the Popular Front in Catalonia). The Generalitat and the central government had lost all freedom of action and assisted passively in the revolution that was taking place in Catalonia and extended to Aragon. The industries were collectivized, but there was always the same problem when the petitions of loans to the banks (collectivized but under control of communists and the government) were denied because those industries were not being supervised by the Generalitat. In October, the committee dissolved itself, and its members became councilors of the government of the Generalitat of Catalonia. However, the Patrullas de Control ("Control Patrols", a revolutionary body that had a repressive character and in which CNT-FAI had a relative majority) continued their activities freely because of the inability of the Catalan government to control them.
The climate of distrust and confrontation was present not only among republican institutions and workers' organizations but also between those organizations, especially of anarchists toward socialists, communists and Catalan nationalists. Even among the communists, there was much division. The Communist Party of Spain (PCE) and the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia (PSUC) followed the official doctrine of the Soviet Union and supported the separate handling of war and revolution and defending the Second Spanish Republic. The PCE was the major communist party in the country, but the PSUC was the main communist organization in Catalonia. At the other extreme, the anti-authoritarian Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM) of former Right and Left Opposition radically opposed Joseph Stalin and supported carrying out the revolution while the war was raging; the anarchists agreed on that point with the POUM.
Tension was rising because a chain of events that took place during the winter that heated the political climate and paved the way for what would take place later. The PCE's campaign against the POUM had begun in March during a political conference in Valencia. The POUM leaders were vilified and accused of being covert Nazi agents under a false revolutionary propaganda of being enemy agents infiltrated in the country. The POUM had come to propose an invitation for Leon Trotsky to reside in Catalonia, despite its differences with him. The POUM leaders were becoming increasingly wary during the spring of 1937. Tension in the streets of Barcelona was becoming evident of the arrival of a hot spring: the Patrullas de Control were led by José Asens and continued arbitrarily arresting and murdering in their infamous paseos. Other anarchist patrols practiced expropriations. Josep Tarradellas, as Companys' right hand, was determined to unify the security forces in Catalonia under one command and to finish with the Patrullas de Control. On 26 March, Tarradellas banned members of the police from having political affiliation and demanded all political organizations to hand over their weapons. Thus, anarchists withdrew from the government of the Generalitat of Catalonia. The open crisis forced Companys to give in to their demands, anarchists retained their weapons, and the Control Patrols remained in place.
On 25 April, a force of Carabineros forced patrols of CNT in Puigcerdà to hand over control of the customs house. Juan Negrín, the Finance Minister, had resolved to end the anomaly under which the CNT controlled that important border. Puigcerdá had become a center of espionage, falsification of passports and clandestine leakage. Its mayor, Antonio Martin, insisted on general collectivization but raised his own livestock. After a violent confrontation occurred, he and several of his men were killed. Negrín then found it easier to gain control over the other customs posts.
The Guardia Nacional Republicana and the Guardia de Asalto ("Assault Guards") were sent to Figueres and other cities in northern Catalonia to replace CNT patrols. In Barcelona, fear began of an outbreak of open warfare between the anarchists and the POUM against the government and the communists. Each side formed weapon caches and secretly fortified its buildings for fear that its rivals would attack it first.
The tense calm continued for one week. May Day, traditionally a day of celebration, was spent in silence, as the UGT and the CNT agreed to suspend their parades, which inevitably would have caused riots.
Opposing sides
Three main political forces were involved in the events that led to the May Days. Although all parties had winning the war as their main objective, the CNT, the Libertarian Youth, and the POUM and other minor groups like the anarchist Friends of Durruti Group or the Trotskyist Bolshevik-Leninist Section of Spain had a clear revolutionary motivation. The participation of these groups in the war, which was decisive in the opening events of the war, was motivated by the defense of the revolution and not the Republic. The Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia (PSUC) considered a revolutionary approach inappropriate without winning the war first.
There were also groups with other political affiliations that were inclined to return to the Republican legality, the authorities of the Republican Government in Valencia and the Generalitat. They forged an alliance with the aforementioned PSUC and the Republican Left of Catalonia. A third sector was composed by the "possibilist" sector of the CNT, supporting an immediate termination of hostilities between both sides. Although the PSUC was not a bourgeois party, from the point of view of the Republican authorities it presented itself as an alternative to the revolutionary chaos, and it advocated for the strengthening of central government that would replace the local committees. To get this done, they proposed a centrally organized and instructed army, led by a single command. George Orwell summarized the PSUC-party line as follows:
Clinging on to the fragments of workers' control and parroting revolutionary aims is worse than useless: not only an obstacle but also counter-revolutionary, because it leads to divisions that fascists can use against us. At this stage we do not fight for the proletarian dictatorship [...].
On the position of the POUM, shared by most of the more radical anarchists, like the Friends of Durruti, Orwell states:
The workers' militias and police-forces must be preserved in their present form and every effort to "bourgeoisify" them must be resisted. If the workers do not control the armed forces, the armed forces will control the workers. The war and the revolution are inseparable.
Chronology
Preliminary events
On 2 May, the Minister of the Navy and Air Force, Indalecio Prieto, telephoned the Generalitat from Valencia. An anarcho-syndicalist telephonist on the other side replied that in Barcelona there was no government, only a Defense Committee. The government was convinced that anarchists were recording their telephone conversations since they, of course, had the means to do so. The same day, there was a call from President Manuel Azaña to Companys, President of the Generalitat. During the conversation, it was cut by the operator, who said that the lines should be used for more important purposes than a mere talk between presidents.
3 May
A force of 200 police officers, commanded by the Minister of Public Order of the Government of Catalonia, Eusebio Rodríguez Salas, went to the Telefónica central exchange and presented itself at the censorship department located on the second floor, with the intention of taking control of the building. The anarchists saw that as a provocation since Telefónica was legally occupied by an anarcho-syndicalist committee, according to a decree on collectivization from the Generalitat itself. Rodríguez Salas, on his part, had authorization from the head of internal affairs of the regional government, Artemi Aiguader i Miró. The anarchist workers opened fire from the second-floor landing of the censorship department. Salas phoned in for help, with a company of the National Republican Guard arriving along with two Control Patrols heads, Dionisio Eroles (of the anarchist police station) and José Asens (of the Control Patrols). Eroles persuaded the CNT workers to cease fire; although they resisted at first, they surrendered their weapons, not before shooting through the windows to empty their ammunition.
A crowd gathered in Plaça Catalunya, and at first it was believed that the anarchists had captured the head of the police. The POUM, the Friends of Durruti Group, the Bolshevik-Leninists and the Libertarian Youth took positions, and after a few hours all of the political parties had taken out the weapons that they had hidden and began building barricades. From that skirmish, battles began in various parts of the city. Several hundred barricades were built and police units occupied roofs and church towers.
The PSUC and the government controlled the urban sectors on the east side of the Ramblas. Anarchists dominated the western sectors and all the suburbs. In the city centre, where the headquarters of trade unions and political parties (installed in requisitioned buildings and hotels) were relatively close, shooting began, and cars circulating were machine-gunned. In the Telefónica building a truce was agreed and telephone communications, which were essential for war operations, were not interrupted. The police, installed on the first floor, even sent bocadillos to the anarchists, who occupied the upper floors. However grenades thrown from the rooftops blew up several police cars. Early in the evening the leaders of the POUM proposed to the Barcelona anarchist leaders the formation of an alliance against the communists and the government. The anarchists refused immediately.
4 May
On 4 May, Barcelona was a city plunged into silence, interrupted only by the fire of rifles and machine guns. Shops and buildings were covered by barricades. Anarchist armed groups attacked the barracks of the Assault Guards and government buildings. The government and communist militias returned fire. Fears started over a Civil War inside the Civil War. At eleven o'clock, the delegates of the CNT met and agreed to do everything possible to restore calm. Meanwhile, the anarchists Joan García Oliver and Federica Montseny launched an appeal on the radio to ask their followers to lay down their weapons and return to their jobs. Jacinto Toryho, the director of the CNT newspaper Solidaridad Obrera, expressed the same sentiment. Anarchist ministers arrived in Barcelona, and with them were Mariano Rodríguez Vázquez "Marianet" (secretary of the national committee of the CNT), Pascual Tomás and Carlos Hernández (from the executive committee of the UGT). None of them wanted a confrontation with the communists, and President Francisco Largo Caballero had no desire to use force against the anarchists. Federica Montseny later said that the news of the riots had caught her and the other anarchist ministers totally unprepared.