Читать книгу Living Anarchism - Chris Ealham - Страница 6

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.

—Albert Camus

1.1 La Vall d’Uixó

José Peirats Valls was born on 15 March 1908, in La Vall d’Uixó, in Castelló, the most northern of the three Valencian provinces, immediately south of Catalonia. La Vall was a small village, where the summer sun could send temperatures up to forty degrees.1 Like most of Valencia at this time, La Vall was essentially agrarian, specialising in fruit production for the export market and in the production of hemp. The second child of Teresa Valls Rubert and José Peirats Dupla, José was born into the most impoverished sectors of society. His parents resided in Calvario Street, literally Calvary Street. Colloquially, this meant agony or torment and certainly there would be much of this in José’s early life and, indeed, beyond. While most of the Peirats Valls clan were agricultural labourers, José’s parents worked for most of the year as alpargateros, making espadrilles (alpargatas), the rope-soled shoes popular with urban and rural workers. Even though the travails of alpargateros were less physically demanding than working in the heat of the fields, they were still badly paid. His parents led a poverty-stricken existence and, like many other valldeuxenses, they were obliged to supplement their income by harvesting oranges in Burriana, some twenty-five kilometres away. The harvest was a major local event: José’s parents had met there, and his first memory was of a vast carpet of oranges, when he accompanied his family to Burriana.2

Peirats’s parents had six children, a number not uncommon at this time, when rampant infant mortality rates decimated poor families. Tragedy bore down upon José from a tender age: only he and his elder sister Dolores survived into adulthood; two of their younger siblings dying in La Vall, two more in Barcelona. The worst everyday hardships were offset by strong family and community networks. If someone experienced a spell of unemployment or ill health, working relatives or friends offered support. To a degree, popular reciprocity compensated for the underdeveloped state welfare system and, judging from José’s generally positive recollections of village life, his family was saved the deprivation and hunger experienced by the rural dispossessed of Andalusia.

Still, it would be wrong to paint a bucolic picture of the living conditions of the rural lower classes anywhere in Spain at this time. Castelló was largely bereft of educational provision, and the scale of mass illiteracy, especially among women, was comparable with Andalusia, a region often taken to epitomise cultural backwardness.3 Both José’s parents were semi-illiterate, speaking only Catalan, the first language of valldeuxenses, who, like young José, were blissfully ignorant of Castilian, the official state language. This highlighted the de facto autonomy enjoyed by many villages and the limited reach of the weak central state; indeed, life developed there without any real contact with the state, very much in accordance with the federalist philosophy José later embraced.

La Vall d’Uixó had no history of the dramatic agrarian struggles that electrified the agrarian south. When José was born, the social structure of the village was largely undifferentiated – the population of around 8,500 inhabitants remained static for some decades. The main local divide was the river Uixó, which bisected the settlement and provided water for the more productive farmland in the lower part of the hamlet. Nevertheless, class fissures had begun to inscribe themselves on to these geographical divisions: the lower part (abaix) of the village was home to wealthier tenant farmers that sometimes employed farmhands and day labourers who, for the most part, resided in the upper zone (dalt) and were the Peirats’s neighbours.4 But if village tensions resulted in occasional outbreaks of violence, these were largely related to local or family feuds, rather than deeper social antagonisms.

Yet, new political winds blew into La Vall. José’s grandfather, Sento Valls, was a committed republican and self-proclaimed atheist who, later in life, separated from his wife, something that would have scandalised Catholic opinion and was most likely related to his extramarital liaisons.5 A municipal employee, Sento had a position of responsibility, working as the bell-ringer and bailiff (alguacil). He also ran the town jail, which meant that most of his children, including Teresa, were born in prison – a great irony when we consider José’s later pursuit of the total elimination of repressive institutions, his own spells in jail, and his many visits to incarcerated friends and family members.6 For the times, Sento was a man of considerable culture – he played the flute and composed some poetry – and he exerted a strong moral influence over his children and encouraged their scepticism towards religion.7 His influence was later transmitted to young José by his mother and her brothers, Nelo and Benjamín, who moved beyond their father’s republicanism to embrace anarchism and socialism respectively. Nelo, who emigrated to Barcelona, was a committed anarchist, while Benjamín, who also spent several years in the Catalan capital, helped found the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE – Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party) in La Vall and was a leading figure in the village cooperative. Both uncles exerted a profound and enduring influence over the young Peirats, greater even than that of his parents. This was particularly true of Benjamín, an agricultural labourer who adhered to a strict moral code that was, in crucial respects, more anarchist than socialist, and which was rooted in a deep respect for his fellow human beings. José was particularly inspired by Benjamín’s spirit of sacrifice, his unshakeable faith in social progress, and his strict system of personal conduct and moral rectitude. His example of personal discipline was something that Peirats emulated in his own life.8

Certainly, José acquired more from the Valls, ‘people with character’, than the Peirats, ‘of limited mettle and somewhat startled’.9 There is no evidence of any political affiliations on the Peirats side of the family. José’s father was more sensual: he had a considerable talent for singing, which he joyously indulged at parties or verbenas, not always to the satisfaction of his wife. While José later developed a similar love of song (he would frequently sing in the streets on the way to work and at the request of friends at parties10), it is hard to discern any other direct paternal influences. As he later noted, his father was taciturn, withdrawn, ‘weak in spirit’, generally resigned to his secondary role within the family.11 Teresa, the real force within the household, likened his father to an ‘entombed charred log’ (tizón enterrado),12 whom she dominated, presiding over what José dubbed ‘an authentic matriarchy’.13 Despite her lack of formal education, Teresa was a remarkably confident, assured, and assertive woman, even when dealing with those higher up the social ladder.14 As Peirats later observed of her, ‘She had a powerful temperament. Her immense personality overcame all obstacles. She was the true axis of the family during the bad times, which were frequent during our childhood.’15

It was Teresa’s dissatisfaction with their miserable life in La Vall that impelled the family to migrate to Barcelona.16 In his letters to Teresa, her brother Nelo assured her of the abundant work for alpargateros in the Catalan industrial behemoth, of its superior quality of life, and, importantly, he offered to pay for the family’s passage north. Teresa quickly convinced her husband to accept the project and, testimony to the precariousness of life in La Vall, just a few days later José and his father left ‘with a blanket and a sack’ with their clothes for the port at Burriana en route to Barcelona.17

The cheapest way of reaching Barcelona was by boat, a veritable adventure for José, then just three and a half years old. He could not have appreciated that this was a journey into the eye of a social and political vortex, the beginning of an odyssey of discovery and struggle that would take him across two continents, two oceans, and six countries in the course of a life that resembled that of the Quixote: the idealistic dreamer, ever poised to confront injustice and tyranny throughout a semi-nomadic existence. Nor would he have grasped the irony that on his journey his main protection from the autumn night chill and sea winds was a red-and-black checked blanket;18 these were the colours of the CNT, the revolutionary union formed a year earlier in the city that lay ahead of José, a union whose future would soon become deeply entwined with his.19

1.2 Barcelona

Barcelona changed José’s life irrevocably. He was overwhelmed by the contrast between the parochial, insular world of La Vall and the seething cosmopolitanism of his new city. Approaching the port of Barcelona, he observed ‘the sea of houses’ of the working-class districts hemmed in by the surrounding mountains and hills and the chimneys sprouting up from the city’s industrial neighbourhoods, projecting black smoke into the sky. Ashore, the frenetic rhythm and noise of the port startled his senses, as dockers and carters unloaded ships and distributed produce on the quays. Flanked by trams and the few cars in circulation at that time, the new arrivals made their way to uncle Nelo’s house, in nearby Cruz de los Canteros Street, in Poble Sec, an inner city neighbourhood nestled between Montjuïc mountain and the urban frontier of the Paral.lel, a long avenue that was home to a myriad of theatres, cafés, cabarets, and taverns and which epitomised the city’s modernity. Eminently working-class, Poble Sec had a large Valencian population, consisting of an overwhelming majority of poor migrants crammed into overcrowded housing. With an illiteracy rate of over 50 per cent,20 one historian described Poble Sec as a ‘slum district’.21 Daily life for inhabitants was structured by the rhythms of industrial capitalism: before and after work, the streets were packed with workers making their way to and from the factories in the contiguous industrial district of Sants or the nearby La Canadiense, the city’s most important hydroelectric plant.

José’s father soon found work in the espadrille workshop of a childhood friend in Sants, where valldeuxenses were a sizeable minority.22 In keeping with prevailing patterns of working-class immigration, the Peirats arrived in instalments: once José and his father were settled, they were joined by his mother and two sisters. The family was now united in a city that was deeply divided and marked by conflict – the most recent being the 1909 urban uprising known as the ‘Tragic Week’ (‘Semana Trágica’), a week of anti-conscription street protests punctuated by barricades, attacks on factories, and the burning of religious property.23 Poble Sec was an important focus of the uprising, and insurgent crowds assaulted every religious building in the neighbourhood, from churches and convents to Catholic schools.24 In the repression that followed, the security forces killed 104 civilians, injuring 125. Over 2,500 people, for the most part trade unionists and left-wingers, were imprisoned. Seventeen death sentences were passed, five of which were carried out in the nearby Montjuïc fortress, which cast a dark shadow over Poble Sec.

Working-class Barcelona was left traumatised. José was exposed to this collective trauma: he overheard his uncle talking with friends in the evenings about the colonial war in Morocco, the urban uprising, the prisoners, and the executions; he also heard satirical songs vilifying the authorities and politicians.25 Uncle Nelo, who gradually fathered anarchist ideas in the mind of his young nephew, communicated popular anticlerical myths to José, telling him how priests had used cannon to defend a church from attack.26 At weekends, when the family escaped the city for the cleaner air of Montjuïc to make a paella below the fortress, Nelo told him of the sacrifice of Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia, the anarchist educator executed after being charged with ‘moral responsibility’ for the uprising.27 Through Nelo, José discovered new words like ‘trade unions’ and initials like ‘CNT’ – the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo periodically rented the Paral.el’s theatres for meetings and rallies and had held its first national congress in Barcelona just weeks before his arrival.

Barcelona was the capital of Spain’s labour movement, which was shaped by a buoyant anti-state culture. From around the 1900s, the city’s long anarchist tradition laid the basis for a rising anarcho-­syndicalist movement, which saw revolutionary industrial unionism as the best method whereby workers could seize control of the capitalist economy. There are complex reasons for the powerful lure of anarcho-syndicalism in the city.28 There was a popular perception that the state, which possessed limited welfare functions in comparison with England and Germany, was a negative, repressive force in social life. This, combined with a conflictive industrial relations context, mili­tated against reformist trade unionism and fostered direct action struggles. Since the advent of industrialisation, employers had been implacably hostile to any checks on their authority in the workplace; they opposed even a token union presence in the factories and rallied to destroy labour organisation by sacking militants wherever possible.29 The ‘hunger pact’ (pacto del hambre) or ‘lockout’ – whereby union activists were excluded from the workplace – was another of their weapons. Yet the determination of local workers to improve living conditions ensured labour organisation endured the employer offensive. For elites and authorities alike, the ‘Red subversion’ of the ‘unpatriotic’ proletarian enemy within had to be crushed by the military, which played the role of domestic policeman. While some sections of the bourgeoisie viewed the central state as an anti-Catalan force, industrialists recognised the Madrid government was a vital ally in their struggle with local workers. The bitterness of the social war, and the scant prospects for moderation, saw the unions adopt increasingly radical and aggressive tactics – a situation that allowed for a strong influence of anarchist and later anarcho-syndicalist ideas. Barcelona’s unions were bolstered by untrammelled urban growth during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. With the arrival of thousands of migrants from the poor and depressed rural areas of Spain, by 1910 the city’s population was close to 600,000. Like the Peirats family, these newcomers came in search of dreams of what José later termed the ‘Catalan California’.30 The limits of the ‘Barcelona dream’ were manifest: the vast wealth generated by local industry remained in the hands of the few and economic incertitude was the norm for the city’s workers, particularly the migrants.

These first years in Barcelona were punctuated by economic insecurity and personal tragedy. This would have had an immense impact upon José, who was a very sensitive boy, well attuned to the sufferings of his parents, relatives, and neighbours. Like most working-class families, the Peirats moved in search of better or cheaper accommodation. After Poble Sec, they resided for six years in Badalona Street, in Sants, a district which, like much of proletarian Barcelona, had high levels of tuberculosis, glaucoma, and other health problems related to poor diet and bad housing. Peirats was deeply affected by the deaths, in quick succession, of a baby sister and a younger brother.31 He was further shaken by the imprisonment of uncle Nelo, who was detained in a police swoop on Montjuïc as he foraged for snails and firewood on common land. In keeping with the arbitrary practices of the authorities, Nelo was interned for a couple of weeks, first in the Montjuïc military fortress, and later in the Modelo prison, Barcelona’s main incarceration centre, before being released without charge. Members of the Peirats clan, José included, visited him in jail daily, bringing him much-needed food and cheer. The sight of his favourite uncle incarcerated surely nourished his growing awareness of the injustices surrounding him.

The environment within the Peirats household was relatively liberal. The unrestricted parental authoritarianism that stifled the de­veloping spirit of many children at this time was largely missing. While there was a domestic hierarchy, it was not rigidly imposed: the views of the children counted and the parents did not simply impose their will in the domestic sphere, preferring to cultivate supportive and open relationships with their offspring. Despite their lack of formal education, José’s parents encouraged him to nurture and frame his understanding of the world. For instance, his semi-literate father patiently helped him ‘tie syllables together’.32

Despite two adult incomes (Teresa also worked making espadrilles), the family remained poor and their clothing was second hand.33 Significant sacrifices ensured the children received education, the great aspiration of most working-class parents at this time. Teresa especially was convinced of José’s lively intelligence, and in 1913, aged five, he entered a council-run school. This proved to be an inauspicious initiation in the world of learning. The school contrasted sharply with his experiences in two key ways: firstly, teaching was in Castilian rather than his native Catalan;34 secondly, the authoritarian ­pedagogical creed that ‘words penetrate with blood’, which relied on fear and ‘blows and kicks’ to instil obedience, clashed frontally with the relative freedom at home.35 Several teachers were priests and devotees of a system of punishment that one of Peirats’s contemporaries dubbed ‘the prison-school’.36 Pupils were routinely left thirsty and were denied toilet visits.37 Like others of his generation, José clashed with this repressive authority structure and ‘the despotism of the teachers’ sealed his first rebellion: ‘The abuses of those in control awoke in my rebel soul an overwhelming aversion to the school….38 I didn’t like being hemmed in.’39 He started truanting, spending the daily school fee on sweets and gaining a different education in the streets. Along with other truants and street children, he pilfered fruit and vege­tables from goods trains arriving at the nearby Magòria station. These antics earned him a beating from the priests and, on more than one occasion, ‘extreme thrashings’ from his mother, who felt betrayed that he was squandering both his chance to get an education and the family’s scarce economic resources. Despite bearing his punishments stoically, he was hurt most by his mother’s description of him as a ‘bad son’.40 His parents punished his disobedience further, sending him to a convent school in nearby Hostafrancs. This was at variance with the family’s prevailing anti-clerical spirit but, in an age when the clergy enjoyed a de facto monopoly over schooling, there were few secular alternatives. His parents were mistaken if they believed José would benefit from a more disciplined learning environment. Their rebellious progeny refused to bow to the harsher regime and, voting with his feet, he truanted again to free himself from the denigrating humiliations of the clergy, for whom he felt an enduring hostility.41

Around this time, at the age of six, José awoke one morning with intense pain in his left leg. Diagnosed initially by a local doctor as suffering from rheumatic pain, his condition deteriorated and days later he was hospitalised in the Hospital de Santa Cruz.42 His parents were devastated as José became sicker and lost strength. Physicians were inca­pable of providing an accurate diagnosis regarding his mysterious condition, which José himself later termed, mistakenly, ‘semi-poliomyelitis’.43 It is highly likely he suffered from Legg–Calvé–Perthes disease (commonly known as Perthes), a rare condition that affects annually around 1 in every 100,000 children, generally between five and ten years of age and which can result in the deformation of the femur; over time, the cartilage becomes eroded and a hip replacement operation may be required.44 One doctor proposed amputating José’s leg, although fortunately he was too weak to undergo surgery.45 Equally fortunately, Teresa defied the drastic and, as time would show, wholly unnecessary meas­ures proposed by the physicians, cursing them and removing José from the hospital. Since conventional medicine had apparently failed, Teresa yielded to the weight of popular superstition and sought ‘alternative’ treatment, taking José to a healer (curandero) in La Vall, who applied a poultice of punctured snails to his leg, gave him red wine, and advised him to stay away from the filth of the city.46 Remarkably, José’s condition improved, although this probably owed more to the post-traumatic plateau that precedes the initial onset of Perthes disease. He remained in La Vall with his mother for several months – a stay prolonged by their poverty: having spent their scant savings on hospital bills, they only got money for their passage to Barcelona after José was well enough to work as a hawker, selling rabbit skins.47

José was deeply marked by this illness. Besides being left with a limp and with one leg slightly shorter than the other, he faced intermittent pain that grew more intense from his late twenties onwards.48 As a child, his suffering was also emotional. He was mocked remorselessly by peers and adults alike for his limp:49 ‘I faced degrading comments until I was able to gain respect with my fists, receiving more than I gave.’50 The illness did not, however, limit his height or overall physical strength; although known to family and friends during his early years by the diminutive ‘Little José’ (‘Pepet’), he was average height for his generation. With blond, curly locks, he had an air of gentle innocence but, as he recovered in La Vall, he became an accomplished fighter. Taunted by local children due to his accent, which had assimilated new tones in Barcelona, he challenged his tormentors to physical combat (regardless of age, reputation, and size), taking on all comers and triumphing often with new tactics he had acquired in the streets of his adoptive city. On one occasion, he was confronted by the furious mother of one of his defeated rivals, who called him ‘a worthless Catalan’ and challenged young Peirats to find the courage to hit her. He duly accepted, striking her in the face, much to her horror.51 This youthful disregard for hierarchy reflected what he later described as his ‘disposition given to struggle and rebellion’.52

There is further evidence of this disposition. After his return to Barcelona, he became enraged at the sight of an uncle physically abu­sing his wife and leapt at the adult aggressor, seizing him by the throat before being subdued by his father.53 He therefore displayed an open resistance to adult, or any other, authority at an early age, especially when he perceived an injustice was being perpetrated. Nevertheless, he remained a sensitive child and the relative isolation occasioned by his illness encouraged a tendency towards introspection and reflection.

In Barcelona, at the time, industry boomed during Spain’s profitable neutrality in World War I. Not only were the benefits of the boom unevenly distributed, but the drive to feed foreign markets led to a subsistence crisis and a rampant inflation. It is estimated that the cost of living in Barcelona increased by 50 per cent between 1914 and 1919.54 Amid growing poverty in the Peirats home, there were no presents at Christmas. The family was in debt with most of the local shopkeepers – a situation aggravated by José’s medical bills. (It is striking that, in the course of his unpublished memoirs, over 1,000 pages, the only direct reference to consumerism was during World War I, when José and his friends collected cards depicting either wartime leaders or scenes from the war that came with chocolate bars.55) Family life was very much bound up with that of the neighbourhood: any holidays were celebrated with friends and neighbours, either with picnics and paellas on Montjuïc or in a local tavern. These were often rowdy gatherings, with alcohol, singing, guitars, castanets, and dan­cing. José’s father was much in demand due to his fine singing voice, although Teresa eventually curtailed his appearances at such fiestas.56

José, meanwhile, became increasingly aware of the injuries of class: he was barred from participating in a school recital, as his parents could not afford the outfit required for the performance. Disillusioned with school, he started truanting again. As before, his errant ways were discovered. Rather than punishing José, this time his parents initiated a frank discussion of his objections to the church school. They explained that, while they wanted him to get a formal education, something that was clearly not happening with him roaming the streets, they could ill-afford to waste their limited resources. Finally, Teresa presented him with a choice: he either immerse himself in his studies or enter the world of work, as was common at a time when child labour was most prevalent. He opted for the latter and in 1916, aged eight, having hardly attended primary school, he started work.

He had a succession of jobs, first in a light metalwork shop, making screws for coffins, then as an apprentice in a photographic workshop, where a combination of his disregard for authority and the ­artlessness of youth saw him dismissed after pilfering from his employer. He worked in a tinsmith’s shop, until forced to leave due to worsening leg pains.57 Finally, he filled a vacancy in the textile plant where his sister Dolores worked. Because it is common for Perthes sufferers to exper­ience great pain after standing for long periods of time or following repeated movements carrying weight, he suffered with his ‘gammy leg’.58 Sometimes Dolores had to help him walk home, even giving him a piggyback ride for part of the journey.59

These ongoing physical problems, coupled with their faith in José’s obvious intelligence, encouraged his parents to find him a new school. After making enquiries among friends and neighbours, he was enrolled in the school of the Workers’ Rationalist Athenaeum in Sants.60 The athenaeum was a pivotal institution within the local community; its plays, for instance, were so well attended that sometimes spectators had to bring their own chairs.61 Apart from being a couple of minutes’ walk from the family home, the school appealed to Teresa as it rejected corporal punishment. The teacher, Juan Roigé, who came from a family of anarchists, was inspired by the pedagogical principles of Ferrer i Guàrdia’s Modern School movement, with its stress on non-hierarchical education.

The Sants Athenaeum was part of a network of alternative cultural centres in Barcelona that compensated for the underdeveloped welfare state by providing educational and leisure services, such as drama and choral associations, libraries, evening classes, and hiking groups. There was a transforming element to the athenaeum: they aimed to forge a countercultural vision of the world that would raise working-class consciousness and challenge capitalist hegemony. Many of the CNT’s leading activists emerged from the rationalist schools, while the athenaeum played an active role in creating and propagating a distinctly alternative culture that rivalled the official one.62

This experience gave José his first direct contact with the alternative working-class public sphere to which he would devote his life. He flourished in the new school, where classes were conducted in Catalan by teachers who were frequently CNT members or anarchist activists. Gone were the beatings and humiliations; classroom discipline was maintained through reason and the charisma of the teachers. Students of both sexes were educated together and they were encouraged to formulate ideas freely, without prejudice or respect for established orthodoxy. This liberal, freethinking learning environment was far more in keeping with the disposition of the Peirats family and it irrevocably changed José’s attitude towards education. As he later reflected, ‘Once enrolled, I worked with all my heart and soul.’63 He underwent a profound personal change and was transformed into an industrious student, a voracious reader who excelled in class and demonstrated a lively intelligence. As another ‘graduate’ from a rationalist school reflected, ‘The pupil emerged with a set of morals.’64

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.

He now became a brickmaker (ladrillero), one of the oldest activities in human history, a sector in which valencianos were heavily represented in Barcelona.69 Conveniently for Peirats, many of the city’s brickworks (bóvilas) were located in the Sants-Collblanc-Les Corts axis, all very close to home.70 There was nothing exceptional about his early baptism in the world of industrial work. If children from the very poorest families rarely saw the inside of a school, it was the norm for working-class boys and girls of José’s generation to be robbed of their childhood by the dull compulsion of economic forces, generally leaving school by the age of ten at the latest, as was the case with his sister Dolores.71 This was the start of an accelerated journey through life: if childhood ended at eight or nine, working-class youths were prematurely transformed into young adults by fourteen and many were already physically old at forty.

Workplace conditions were frequently atrocious, even in traditionally more protected sectors like the print industry. Employers, who knew they enjoyed the full backing of the authorities, adopted a cava­lier attitude towards what they viewed as costly health and safety measures.72 Such was the seriousness of the situation that even the bourgeois press periodically condemned deficient workplace safety.73 Arguably, factory conditions were worse still when José started work in World War I, since wartime neutrality presented an unprecedented boom for entrepreneurs and fostered a new type of nouveaux riches employer, far more obsessed with profits and anxious to cut production costs, irrespective of the dangers to employees, who were in no short supply. Conditions were worse still for child workers, who were on the receiving end of brutal labour discipline imposed by adult foremen. In addition, José recalled having periodic fights at work, as he responded robustly to anyone, young or adult, who mocked his limp.74

In the brickworks, conditions were notoriously tough. Consisting of an oven in which bricks were forged, a chimney, and gaps in the walls through which the workers would pass to deposit bricks in a nearby store, the brickworks were exposed to the elements. Work was hard and fast-paced, as workers rushed to move bricks from the oven to the store. Barefoot and dressed in little more than baggy shorts and a hat to protect them from the heat of the oven, they toiled in extremely high temperatures in summer, when they became tanned, while in winter they faced chill winds. It was, as José reflected years later, and not without nostalgia, ‘a savage but fulfilling profession, working in the open, without shoes and the feet in contact with mother earth’.75 The most arduous and perilous tasks, such as scurrying around close to the ovens, were reserved for young workers.76 Employers were loath to improve hygiene and safety measures. In 1923, a brickmaker’s manual laid out a series of good practices in the industry, including the installation of showers, the cessation of winter work, and the limitation of employment to children over thirteen – all were ignored entirely.77

By winter, it was clear the work was aggravating José’s leg condition, so he moved to a glass factory, which had the benefit of being closed to the elements. The work was no less dangerous: injuries and burns were common and apprentices faced violence from foremen and adult workers. Aged just ten, José gained direct experience of this: when he committed a tired error at the end of a night shift, he was punched and left unconscious by an adult co-worker. Once revived by his workmates, he was enraged, vowing to his aggressor he would find him when he was older and settle scores. (In his unpublished memoirs, he related how he kept track of his assailant in the barrio and, as a young man, returned to his workplace to confront him, only to discover his nemesis had died a few weeks earlier.78 We can only speculate what might have occurred had he found the aggressor.)

While factory life work was anything but a gymnasium for the young, José’s experience of manual labour saw him develop into a strong teenager. His childhood illness notwithstanding, he was an able-bodied young man – about 1.60 metres, an average height for his generation – and more than capable of defending himself. Yet, perhaps more tellingly, in 1918, soon after the aggression, José sought redress through collective channels in what was his initiation in labour struggle. This was no conventional industrial conflict for better wages, but a local and generational struggle of the apprentices in the glass sector, who sought better treatment inside the factories both from employers and their adult co-workers – a demand that directly reflected José’s experience of workplace violence. Although I have been unable to find any information about this dispute, it is possible to make certain observations. In a conflict spearheaded by what were still children, there was a strong element of play. For youths very much captivated by news of the world war, they now had the chance to participate in their own ‘war’. Accordingly, José and his fellow strikers armed themselves with sticks and obliged apprentices in two nearby factories to stop work: ‘We waited for the recalcitrant ones when they left work and we gave it to them.’ While years later he would intervene in major CNT conflicts armed with pistols and sometimes explosives, his baptism in social struggle was, ironically, directed against the confederation, in which the adult glass workers were, for the most part, unionised. Without union backing and facing the hostility of their elders, the strike of the young discontents ended when they were forced back to work by their parents.79 Nevertheless, this early and fleeting experience of struggle had a lasting impact on Peirats, and his unwavering trust in the rebellious energies of youth would remain a constant feature of his lifelong activism.

After the failed strike in the glass sector, José returned to work as a brickmaker, where wages were slightly higher to compensate for the tougher work involved.80 In the twenty-year period from 1916–36, he worked in several of the many brickworks scattered around the southern part of Barcelona, in Sants, Collblanc, and in Les Corts, on the site of what is today the Barcelona Football Club stadium.81 This was the profession with which he identified most and which shaped his identity as a worker and his writing. Years later, when he was a renowned anarchist journalist, historian, and translated author, his printed calling cards proudly stated his profession as ‘brickmaker’.82

He was undoubtedly the world’s most published brickmaker. As a rule, the brickmakers exhibited a rough working-class culture and, as a young adult, José himself was very much part of this:

At the time of the morning break, with the heat of the ovens if it was winter, everyone spoke and screamed loudly. Obviously the conversations were far from academic. Obscenities were common currency.

Popular topics were gambling, the voluptuous dancers of Paral.lel cabarets, and the sex workers from the brothels near the port, where many apprentices, including Peirats himself years later, became sexu­ally initiated. There was also much talk of football, of which José described himself as a devoted fan and of ‘el Barça’.83 When weather permitted, the workers organised impromptu football matches during their breaks.84 Despite his limp, Peirats enjoyed the ludic aspects of the game and revelled in the physical challenge.85

Unskilled and underpaid, the brickmakers were perceived negatively in much of working-class society, especially among the more skilled, who looked down on them as the rogues of industry. Yet for José, brickmaking was a means of earning an ‘honest’ living.86 Moreover, his sympathy with the brickmakers was very much in keeping with his growing compassion for the underdog – sentiments that were deepened after his family installed itself in Collblanc, among Barcelona’s growing migrant sub-proletariat.

1.3 Collblanc

With the family economy suffering due to the economic downturn, and the ongoing fall-out of José’s medical bills, in 1918 the Peirats moved from Sants to Collblanc Street, the main street in the neighbouring barrio of Collblanc. This decision again reflected Teresa’s mastery of the family’s destiny. She appreciated that for a lower rent, the family would benefit from more spacious accommodation in Collblanc and, moreover, she could take in lodgers to improve the family finances. Their new top floor flat afforded an uninterrupted view of the Mediterranean coasts of Garraf, the mountains of Montjuïc and Tibidabo, and the chimneys of the nearby brickworks.87 José’s parents found work in an espadrille shop owned by a valldeu­xense, while he and Dolores worked in nearby factories. In the early difficult years in Collblanc, the Peirats shared their residence with up to three lodgers at a time.88 Yet the new flat became the family home where José’s parents lived out the rest of their lives: decades later they, like Dolores, would die in the house. José would remain there for eighteen years, until he was twenty-eight, when the course of his life changed irrevocably with the revolution and civil war of 1936. We might reasonably conclude that Peirats felt a strong sense of duty to his parents after they had become impoverished by his medical expenses. He was always concerned they perceived him as a ‘good’ son; nevertheless, along with his sister, the Peirats constituted a compact and functional family unit.

In their quest for cheaper rents, the Peirats had unconsciously followed Barcelona’s shifting topography of revolution, from the first industrialised barrios (Poble Sec, Sants) to the marginal slums (Collblanc).89 While an administrative part of L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, Collblanc was wedded to Barcelona’s rapidly expanded ­urban periphery and, in the 1920s, it attracted legions of migrant workers, the shock troops of Catalonia’s industrial and urban growth.90 L’Hospitalet experienced vertiginous population growth (over 450 per cent in the 1920s alone) and by the early 1930s it was the second largest population centre in Catalonia, with around 40,000 inhabitants, over 27 per cent of whom were Valencian.91 Most of the new ar­rivals settled in Collblanc and the neighbouring district of La Torrassa, whose combined population grew from 3,810 in 1920 to 21,185 in just ten years.92 For the most part unskilled construction workers, the migrants of Collblanc-La Torrassa were the lowest of the low – iso­lated, spatially and socially, from the rest of L’Hospitalet, eking out an existence on the margins of Catalan ‘civilisation’. As Peirats put it, the area was ‘almost disregarded… We saw ourselves then as second-class Barcelonans.’93

Urban conditions were among some of the most abysmal in the Barcelona area. This rapidly developed space had little or no infrastructure, and some houses lacked water, drainage, and electricity. Streets were often unpaved and many thousands lived in shanty houses. Nevertheless, like in La Vall, the community faced material hardships with mutual aid and reciprocity: if people were in financial trouble, neighbours would help out as best they could, whereas rough justice was meted out to those who abused this solidarity.94

The first years in Collblanc were beset by tragedy. Peirats later defined 1918–20 as a time of ‘crisis’.95 Their arrival coincided with the influenza pandemic that ravaged Europe in the winter of 1918, which claimed perhaps as many as 300,000 lives from all social classes across Spain.96 In Collblanc, the bodies of the dead were carted away under cover of darkness in the hope of stalling popular hysteria. The Peirats family was seriously affected; the entire family being bedridden apart from José senior and Dolores. Although José fell ill, he was outside the most endangered age group of 20- to 40-year-olds and made a full recovery. Uncle Nelo was less fortunate, and his death was a heavy blow for the family, particularly José. The following year, Cisquet, José’s younger brother, died after a hernia operation.97 With the death of his young sister Teresa just a few years earlier, José had, by eleven, attended several family funerals and was painfully aware of the fragility of life.

It is no exaggeration to state that death stalked the barrios. Besides the pandemic, many young males from Collblanc had been conscrip­ted to fight in the Moroccan War and the neighbours were regularly mourning the loss of loved ones.98 Then, with the eruption of social war on the streets of Barcelona, death came closer to home. The end of the World War I saw the coming of age of the CNT, which had attracted a vast membership: by 1919, it claimed close to 800,000 members across Spain, of which around one-third (over 250,000) was massed in its Barcelona stronghold.99 As the economy slowed down in late 1918, the unions flexed their muscles. With the employers determined to break union power, the post-war years were a time of profound social ferment. A major trial of strength came with the 1919 La Canadiense conflict. Much of the state’s repressive arsenal was mobilised; martial law was implemented and, following the militarisation of essential services, soldiers replaced strikers and some 4,000 workers were jailed. Regardless, energy workers paralysed industry across Barcelona province for forty-four days. Amidst food shortages, power cuts, and torch-lit nocturnal army patrols, the Catalan capital seemed like a city at war.100

The La Canadiense conflict polarised the social context. The authoritarian employers’ association, the Federación Patronal Española (Spanish Employers’ Federation), which represented the most militant elements within the Catalan industrial elite, embarked upon classic union-busting tactics. In alliance with extremists within the local military, the employers’ federation pursued its reactionary utopia of pacifying industrial relations manu militari. In the autumn of 1919, the Sindicatos Libres (Free Unions), a Catholic anti-CNT union with a paramilitary wing, was established with the support of the most confrontational employers and officers within the Barcelona garrison.101 This was followed by an eighty-four-day lockout of some 300,000 workers, lasting from 3 November 1919 to 26 January 1920.102 In November 1920, the assault on the CNT gathered pace when General Severiano Martínez Anido was appointed Barcelona civil governor. Having served previously in Morocco and the Philippines, Martínez Anido ruled the city like a colonial fiefdom, appointing General Miguel Arlegui as his police chief and unleashing a two-year reign of terror based on the ‘law of escape’ (ley de fugas), a programme of selective assassination of CNT militants.103

Like the rest of working-class Barcelona, the Peirats were afflicted by this collective trauma. Close to his twelfth birthday at the time of the lockout, José was shocked by the sight of growing numbers of jobless workers begging in the streets. As working-class consumption declined, so did demand for the espadrilles produced by José’s parents, sending the Peirats into poverty. With food increasingly scarce, the family joined groups of workers who seized crops from the fields close to L’Hospitalet or collected wild vegetables. These trips provided José with his first real experience of repressive policing, as the Guardia Civil (Civil Guard) cavalry pursued ‘the peaceful botanists with their sabres’.104 The intensifying class struggle directly impacted on his life – one of his co-workers was assassinated by Free Unions gunmen and his workplace was full of talk of the CNT and of its newspaper, Solidaridad Obrera (commonly known as La Soli). At home, developments were regularly discussed at the dining table, which the family shared with their lodgers: a communist by the name of Gonzalo and two relatives, José’s socialist ­uncle Benjamín and his cousin Vicente, an anarcho-syndicalist militant. The lodgers were an important part of José’s political education, as they regaled him with the interpretations of the worsening political crisis from the perspective of the three main leftist tendencies. During long after-meal conversations, he discovered new terms like ‘Soviet’, ‘social revolution’, ‘proletarian dictatorship’, and, for the first time, heard the names of Karl Marx and Mikhail Bakunin.105

José’s cousin Vicente emerged as a new mentor and replaced Nelo as a guiding anarchist influence. Eight years older than José, Vicente was a twenty-year-old baker and CNT activist. A so-called ‘man of action’, he was a member of the defence committees that enforced strikes and had served a short jail sentence for possession of firearms. Upon his release, Vicente’s parents disowned him, whereupon he was taken in by José’s parents. It is possible that Gonzalo, the commun­ist lodger, had participated in similar activities, for he had also been jailed. José used to visit him frequently, as he had done before, along with the rest of the Peirats family, when uncle Nelo served a short stint in prison.106

At a neighbourhood level, Collblanc-La Torrassa was in a state of effervescence. If the dreams of immigrant labourers for a better life were destroyed by the nightmarish urban crisis, the alternative offered by the CNT provided renewed hope. The CNT was arguably the most important structure in the barrio. Building on and refining bonds of kinship, reciprocity, and mutual aid, it forged a community of resist­ance in the struggle to ameliorate the manifold inequalities of everyday life. For the authorities and men of order, whose grip over this densely-populated area was weak, Collblanc-La Torrassa was a space of fear, ‘the city without law’,107 described by La Voz de Hospitalet as ‘a focus of civic disease’ and home to ‘the detritus of the city’.108

The anarchists, meanwhile, were determined to reshape the local environment and create a social infrastructure of unions, schools, and cooperatives for the ‘new’ proletariat, which, still in formation in the immediate post-war years, would emerge as the decisive revolutionary actor in the 1930s, converting the district into what Peirats described as ‘an anarchist fortress’.109 This was the setting for José’s first mili­tancy and the neighbourhood moulded his perspectives. Living among people deprived of all but the most basic aspects of modern life, he was acutely conscious of their suffering and developed a faith in their ­essential goodness. It was here that his imagination conceived of a world in which the love of humanity and justice could become the moral core of a new order.

In late 1922, aged fourteen, and having completed his ‘apprenticeship’ as a brickmaker, José became a member of the Barcelona CNT’s Sociedad de Ladrilleros (Brickmakers’ Society). Its parent union, the Sindicato de la Construcción (Construction Union), was the most militant of all the city’s unions, which encadred thousands of migrant workers. This coincided with a union recruitment drive ahead of a planned strike action intended to improve the lot of the brickmakers. Ironically, for all the influence of his milieu and his uncle Nelo and cousin Vicente, José was a reluctant cenetista: he was bluntly ordered to join the union by his workplace delegate or be declared a ‘scab’, ‘and then you’ll find out what happens!’110 Yet, once a trade unionist, he immersed himself in CNT activities, regularly attending the union office in Sants after work, where he met and socialised with other activists and perused newspapers and books in the reading room.

Peirats was radicalised by the great brickmakers’ strike of 1923. Beginning on 28 February, the union sought to establish a stable wage system and suppress piecework, which workers viewed as a denigrating and inhumane system based on the payment of a set ‘rate’ for the number of ‘pieces’ produced. Since employers and subcontractors could manipulate the ‘rate’ to suit their circumstances, they found this form of remuneration extremely beneficial. For the brickmakers, it brought insecurity and unexpected fluctuations in their wages when the ‘rate’ was lowered, whereupon they found themselves working longer and producing more simply to secure the earlier level of remuneration. The strike was bitterly contested and dragged on throughout spring into summer. There were frequent violent episodes, including attacks on strike-breakers and workshops.111 While too young to play a role in the ‘combat commandos [that] settled scores with scab traitors’,112 José was fully involved in the conflict, spending long periods in the union office, the nerve centre of the strike. As union resources became stretched, the brickmakers were increasingly fighting a rearguard action.

When the union ruled that single males could work in brickworks outside Barcelona, where there was no dispute with employers, José, still just fifteen, was sent with other cenetistas to work in Castellar del Vallès, twenty-five kilometres from home, returning at weekends to divide up his wages between his family and the union strike fund.113 But by September 1923, after seven months, the strike was collapsing, only to be killed off by the military coup launched by General Miguel Primo de Rivera on 13 September. The brickworkers returned to work in defeat, demoralised and embittered; the employers, however, were jubilant. The owners of Barcelona’s brickworks thanked their military saviour for bringing ‘social and political sanitation’ to their city and to Spain.114 The advent of dictatorship marked the end of a cycle of protest that had gathered pace during the world war. For José, however, this marked a new beginning, a time of reflection, clandestine activism, and consciousness-raising that equipped him with the ideas and beliefs that shaped the course of his life.