Socialism and War

The fact that the Caballeristas had lost control of the UGT executive and most of the provincial secretariats by January 1938 did not mean that the left had been completely defeated. The UGT was a confederation of semi-autonomous industrial unions and the left still had a power base in some of the strongest of these. Throughout 1938 the Ramón González Peña executive and the UGT's unitarist national committee – backed by the majority of the national industrial federations – were ranged against the remaining dissident federations, or, more specifically, against their dissident leaderships.

Leading the attack was the UGT's unitarist-dominated national committee. This was composed as follows: out of a total of forty-two, there were ostensibly thirty-one socialists and eleven communists. However, an analysis of the composition of the socialist membership presents quite a different picture of the internal political balance. There were three unitary current socialists, including Virgilio Llano of Espectáculos Públicos; two PSUC members who were technically socialist, but effectively counted with the communists. There were eighteen socialists of the González Peña tendency, of whom four were sympathetic to the unitary trend, and finally there were eight Caballeristas on the national committee. This breakdown, which appears in a PCE report on the UGT for 1938, reveals the considerable amount of influence wielded by the Communist Party within the national committee. Once this analysis has been taken fully into account, rather than presenting 31:11 as a ratio of comparative strength, something in the order of 22:20 would be a more accurate assessment.