"Magnificent."—Paul Preston, author of The Spanish Holocaust Brick maker by trade, revolutionary anarchist and historian by default; this is a study of the life of José Peirats (1908–1989) and the labor union that gave him life, the CNT. It is the biography of an individual but also of a collective agent—the working class Peirats was born into—and the affective ties of kinship, friendship, and community that cemented into a movement, the most powerful of its type in the world. Chris Ealham is the author of Anarchism and the City: Revolution and Counter-revolution in Barcelona, 1898–1937 .
Оглавление
Chris Ealham. Living Anarchism
Selected List of Acronyms
Dedication
Introduction
Chapter One: A rebel youth
Chapter Two: From the street gangs of Barcelona
Chapter Three: The Second Republic:
Chapter Four: The revolutionary writer (1934–36)
Chapter Five: A revolution consumed by war (1936–39)
Chapter Six: Exiled:
Chapter Seven: Exile in France
Chapter Eight: The limits of the ‘New anarchism’ (1965–75)
Chapter Nine: The return of the ‘democratic danger’ (1975–89):
Conclusion: An indispensable life
Gallery
Endnotes
Bibliography
Index
Copyright
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Living Anarchism
José Peirats and the
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His education was ended by state repression. In 1917, the Spanish monarchy experienced a revolutionary crisis. Rampant inflation had impelled the main trade unions – the CNT and the socialist Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT – General Union of Workers) – to make common cause, and their search for change saw them enter an ad hoc coalition with republican politicians and dissident military officers against the monarchy. The pressure for a social and political opening culminated in August in a general strike – a frontal challenge to the state.65 Still just nine, José was aware of the developing revolutionary crisis: he saw the hardships and food shortages at home and the frequent street protests. For the first time, he sensed the collective power of the masses, as he witnessed the police retreat in the face of working-class women, ‘those skirted battalions’, who sacked food shops and stores and then distributed their haul. In August, he saw the other side of the coin, witnessing soldiers in the streets and the gunfire as they repressed the general strike.66 Having shut down the unions, the escalating repression closed off all the institutions of the proletarian public sphere, including the rationalist schools. José had to watch helplessly as police arrived at his school and detained his teachers.67
Encouraged by José’s progress as a scholar, Teresa hoped he would continue his studies in one of the legally functioning schools. But José would now accept nothing but rationalist schooling. As he recognised years later, ‘I had found my path’,68 and he refused to return to a school system that previously converted him into a truant. With the family economy ailing, he re-entered the world of work, his ‘formal’ education thereby ending at nine.
