Читать книгу Living Anarchism - Chris Ealham - Страница 7

to the anarchist groups (1923–30)

I am a modest writer who emerged

from the fired clay of an oven.

—José Peirats

2.1 The forging of a revolutionary

During the seven years of the dictatorship, Peirats was transformed from a fifteen-year-old child labourer into an enlightened brickmaker, becoming, what was known in working-class circles, ‘un obrero consciente’ (literally, a conscious worker). This conversion, if inexorable, was nonetheless gradual. From age nine onwards, he had assimilated the ‘rough’ culture of the brickmakers, so the teenage cenetista was motivated by adolescent male concerns with sex, hedonism, and football. In keeping with patterns of masculine soci­ability, Peirats was part of a gang of young brickmakers, the leader of which was tattooed – something which, in the 1920s, was not as mainstream as it is today. They frequented the rowdy bars of Collblanc-La Torrassa and Barcelona’s notorious red-light district, the ‘Barrio Chino’ (Chinatown), in search of diversion and nocturnal pleasures.1 As he later recognised, as a youth, he was ‘submerged in the milieu’.2 Accordingly, his first sexual experience was with a ‘Barrio Chino’ prostitute.3 Even for a good-looking teenager like Peirats, whose delicate features and light brown wavy hair doubtless made him attractive to the opposite sex, it was commonplace for young males at this time to purchase sexual services in order to become initiated in sexual intercourse.4 Since such an act was anathema to anarchist morality, it indicates the limits of his ideological development, along with external cultural and peer pressures. Later in life, he would become a fierce critic of such activities and of all relations bound by the cash nexus.

Shortly after this important rite of passage, José’s personal enlightenment accelerated – a process of acculturation that prevented him from becoming a teenage ‘delinquent’. Driven by ‘shame due to my ignorance’, he moved away from his street gang friends with whom he previously caroused bars and found ‘new friends who always had a book under their arm’.5 The workplace was an important educational arena. Having witnessed the sufferings of a co-worker with venereal disease (a major health problem at the time), he modified his sex­ual conduct.6 Meanwhile, during a work break, an older brickmaker showed him a book about the ancient Greeks. Appalled by his limited knowledge, José later confessed that he ‘wanted to know the his­tory of humanity’.7 Increasingly, he craved enlightenment as a means of transcending the injuries of class, of dignifying and beautifying a brutal everyday context. The pursuit of culture was also, to an extent, motivated by the legacy of his illness. Never one to back away from a challenge, hitherto he had responded aggressively to taunts from co-workers about his limp. Now, he resolved to gain respect from those around him through ideas and culture.8

José’s cultural revolution was encouraged by his relationship with Pere Massoni, ‘the spiritual father of Barcelona’s brickmakers’ and former Construction Union secretary.9 The architect of the epic 1923 strike, Massoni was a marked man: blacklisted by employers, he was lucky to be alive, having survived an assassination attempt by right-wing gunmen in 1919 that left him with a pronounced limp and progressive paralysis in an arm.10 Subjected to intense police supervision, Massoni lived clandestinely, with an assumed identity, struggling to sustain the union from the shadows.11 Although the CNT was forced underground, it retained sufficient power during the dictatorship to protect its prominent activists. Accordingly, Massoni found work through an agreement between the illegal CNT and José’s employer, although his fellow brickmakers covered for him when he needed to rest due to his injuries.12 Tall and charismatic, Massoni was the author of a short historical study of the brickmakers from the time of Babylon and had a profound interest in culture. A powerful presence in the bóvilas, he was an inspiration for the young brickmakers. According to Peirats, ‘he was our leader, our guide’,13 ‘a tortured saint’.14 Massoni showed Peirats how someone with physical problems far more pronounced than his own could be respected, and his example impelled him on his path towards becoming an enlightened brickmaker.

José’s struggle for knowledge was the beginning of a revolution in his everyday life, a lifelong fight for individual autonomy and personal discipline, to master his own destiny, and to maximise his human potential. He was accompanied in this journey by Domingo Canela, a co-worker three years his senior.15 The pair first met at the Sants Rationalist School and they were reunited in the brickworks, where José, Canela, and his two brothers worked as a team. Quick workers all, they laboured intensely to meet their quota of bricks before taking unofficial breaks to discuss their common interests. Before Massoni’s arrival, this time was spent playing football outside the brickworks; now, they succumbed to ‘the all-consuming fever of books’16 and used their breaks to discuss their readings and politics before returning to work. Away from work, José and Domingo, who had an intellectual air, nurtured each other’s hunger for the written word: they spent much of their money on literature, visiting bookstalls at weekends and exchanging pamphlets, newspapers, and books with each other, as they transformed themselves into committed anarchists. With a camaraderie based on shared ideas, youth, workplace and neighbourhood loyalties, they were inseparable friends for the next decade or so.17 As teenagers finding their place in the adult world, there was a pronounced ludic element to their exuberant cultural activism. As Canela later recalled, ‘It was a bit like a game. We always wanted to joke, laugh, run… and this shaped our activism, which was always both enjoyable and consistent.’18 These qualities were evident in José’s adult activism; his youthful humour developing into a mordant wit that became a hallmark of his writing style.19

José’s socialist uncle Benjamín, who often resided in the family home in Collblanc, also nurtured his appetite for ideas, allowing him access to his personal library and guiding his reading. Under his supervision, José devoured geographical and historical works by Élisée Reclus and Charles Darwin, as well as the literary oeuvre of French utopian socialist Eugène Sue, such as Les Mystères de Paris – readings they discussed together.20 Benjamín also introduced José to theatre, taking him to the Teatro España in Plaza de España to see the ‘social’ plays by José Fola Igurbide, such as El Cristo moderno and El sol de la humanidad, with their subtext of human justice and resistance to tyranny. Since the dictatorship closed off other channels of social protest, these cultural activities acquired great political significance, often ending in impromptu political debates. José was enthralled by the power of theatre.21 Like many anarchists before him, he appreciated its propaganda value as a vehicle for the expression of a collective project, a means by which the audience could assimilate new concepts.22 Throughout his life, he devoted considerable energy to combing the languages of art and protest, organising theatre productions and writing two short plays.23

His cultural obsession prompted him to attend evening classes with Roigé, his former teacher at the Sants Rationalist School, who now taught in one of the union-funded schools that were still tolerated by the authorities. Although José was approaching the age of conscription, his mother was delighted he could hone his writing skills. But the school provided Peirats with more than basic literacy. He was exposed to the masters of Greek philosophy (Diogenes, Socrates, and Epicurus), across to the French anarchist individualism of Han Ryner (Jacques Élie Henri Ambroise Ner).24 Yet, arguably, it was the pedagogical context that moved him most: horizontal classroom practices that transcended social and gender hierarchies, debates fostering the development of powers of reasoning and public speaking, and class hikes in the countryside that deepened his love of nature. This experience was a defining one, giving him his first taste of genuinely free relationships across the gender divide. He even fell (unsuccessfully) in love with a classmate – a painful episode that would be repeated in his early adult life. In short, the school experience left him with a set of human values and anarchist convictions that guided his later life.25

He acquired a new set of mental structures – a morality and a way of living, including temperance, all rooted in a deep sense of egalitarianism, camaraderie, and cultural improvement. He found himself hopelessly in love with ideas and their beauty, with an unbridled desire for knowledge and a voracious appetite for the written word; reading had become his ‘vice’.26 He was also endowed with a new confidence that he could overcome the injuries of class and the cultural limits stemming from his social rank. These convictions, as we will see, remained with him: his very existence was inflected by a profound struggle for education and culture, the central values of the anarchist movement that he internalised as the core of his own existence.

His respect for scientific rationalism saw him declare war on all forms of ‘obscurantism’. This included spiritism, an occult, humanist doctrine popular in Catalan freethinking circles.27 Prior to his evening classes, a curious Peirats, who ‘continued in search of the absolute truth with the tenacity of a little philosopher’,28 had been exposed to spiritism by an uncle and an aunt. While he appreciated the moral content of spiritism as well as its hostility to Catholic idolatry and its stress on peace and love, his new intellectual maturity pushed towards pure reason. His final break with the spiritists reflected a different kind of maturity: having become infatuated with a female member of his spiritist group, he quarrelled with her male partner and left.29

Still a teenager, José defined himself as ‘a romantic dreamer. I was always dreaming.’ Faced with a harsh political context, he sometimes retreated into adventure stories, including westerns, as well as travelogues that introduced him to new and exotic habitats. These readings helped him envisage alternative realities, a ‘marvellous world’, and, in walks with friends, his flights of imagination transformed the trees of the banks of the river Llobregat into an African jungle, while the beaches became the landscape of a desert island.30

These last impulses of adolescent play eventually gave way to the desire of a young adult to make his mark on the world: ‘I took on the ambition of becoming someone in life.’31 Peirats created a study area in his bedroom with a desk and built a library, quite literally, as Benjamín had instructed him how to construct bookcases from large egg boxes, which supported his growing collection of Russian anarchist classics by Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin, studies of the natural world and geo­graphy, as well as works by Tolstoy, Ibsen, Kant, and Schopenhauer.32

This eclectic collection provides an insight into Peirats’s conception of culture. First of all, his was a non-partisan culture, far removed from the restrictive definition of ‘proletarian culture’ advocated by the official (Stalinised) communist movement in the 1920s; in contrast, Peirats believed workers must embrace and master the culture of humanity. Second, his quest for culture was combined with a deep appreciation of aesthetics – something that went hand in hand with his conviction that the exalted ideas of total liberty were beautifully ennobling for humanity. His craving for art and literature was a means of embellishing his life, a counterbalance to the deadening spiritual slavery of capitalist work. In a way that presaged the later stance of the Situationists, José grasped the aesthetic and poetic qualities of revo­lution, which he saw as a kind of artistic production: ‘A genuinely revolutionary creation is like a work of art.’33 And all creation presupposed an affirmative struggle against structures of everyday oppression, without which the ultimate act of communal creation would be impossible.34 In sum, his quest for beauty was a yearning for the splendour of revolution, a quest for revolutionary truth. Third, all the above implied an individual struggle. This facet was driven home by his numerous references to the sacrifices of the autodidact:

Culture, like freedom, has to be conquered. A law of compensation dominates life. Without an equivalent effort, nothing is possible. The sacrifice depends on individual will…. Culture does not come begging; it is attained through the open struggle against the bedrock of our prejudices.35

This struggle marked José’s life indelibly. In 1985, four years before his death, he wrote in a private letter that ‘What others may learn with ease, required a titanic struggle on my part.’36 We see here key aspects of his personality: internal strength and certainty, dogged tenacity and fortitude – traits that enabled him to counterbalance ‘the lost time’ of his early life and the ‘deficit in his knowledge base’.37 For Peirats, this was a personal refusal to accept the limits of his social, familial, and environmental circumstances, a rebellion against the cultural condition imposed on him by the state and by capital.38 This endowed him with an immense belief in his own capacity for self-improvement: he taught himself to paint in his sixties and he began writing short stories in his seventies. Paradoxically, this act of will to make culture ‘attainable’ could lead to condescension:

Those who cannot read choose to be like that… The autodidact is a cultural phenomenon far more interesting than all visions of beauty immortalised in treatises and monographs… The autodidact is a flower of life… his dogged and silent labour of filing through the ­prison bars of his ignorance makes him a hero.39

Peirats unquestionably saw himself in the tradition of earlier ‘­heroes’ like Anselmo Lorenzo, the autodidact printer who, more than anyone else, came to symbolise the human qualities of anarchist intellectuals.40 Lorenzo’s example forged a cult of the autodidact in CNT circles. As José recognised, ‘Ninety-nine per cent of the anarchist contingent in Spain is a living example of the autodidact.’41

In certain respects, acculturation signified a desire for socio-­cultural advance. In Peirats’s case, ‘I achieved this scratching around in books and I gained respect.’42 Yet beneath an individual sense of self-worth and dignity, there rested a deep sense of humility. It is risible to conclude Peirats was building up cultural capital to enhance his social position or to obtain a financial gain. Had he nursed such ambition, he was intelligent enough to appreciate there were better places to pursue this than within the anarchist movement. Indeed, his initial experience of CNT membership in the early 1920s was enough to show him that his activism would more likely take him to a prison cell rather than a summer house in Barcelona’s bourgeois suburbs. There was also a pronounced social dimension to Peirats’s cultural mission. While he saw anarchism as a vehicle for attaining perfection, his was not a yearning for beauty in a contemplative, passive sense, but at a collective level. Hence, he would read to his illiterate neighbours after dinner, particularly in the balmy summer months,43 and he would always share his new ideas with workmates, neighbours, and friends.

To comprehend fully this struggle for culture, we need to consider the context of the Primo de Rivera regime, which closed off the principal activities of the anarcho-syndicalist public sphere (unions and newspapers) in Barcelona in an attempt to quell the mass movement that so threatened the socio-economic order during 1918–23. Meanwhile, the socialist movement, which briefly cooperated with the dictator, was largely left unmolested, creating a bitter rivalry for years to come. Hitherto, José’s activism had been limited to the trade unions but now, in their absence, he was part of a younger generation engaged in consciousness-raising activities in which they identified anarchism as the ideological lodestar they were to follow in coming years.

2.2. The affinity group

The vehicle for these youth’s anarchist energies was the affinity group, the basic cell of libertarian sociability. It is unclear when José first joined an affinity group but, by the late 1920s, he and Domingo Canela were members of Verdad, a group involved, among other things, in representing works of drama. Created by older activists, Verdad sought to bridge the generation divide and attract youth to their banner by organising theatre productions, the proceeds of which were donated to the prisoner support groups.44 This emphasis on theatre appealed to Peirats’s imagination and he readily joined other members of Verdad in producing agitprop-style productions consisting of social plays and poetry readings, which were followed by a debate. Through these productions, Verdad sought to bring the social issues of the day closer to the workers.45

José faced a new struggle in 1928, when he reached the age of mili­tary service. His initial intention was that of many young anarchists: to declare himself a fugitive (prófugo) and go to France. This plan led to a bitter row with his mother, who was chastened by the abortive flight of her nephew Vicente to France and his subsequent incarcer­ation. Teresa cried and pleaded with Peirats to reconsider. Resorting to emotional blackmail, she accused him of abandoning the parents who sacrificed so much for him during his illness. They reached a compromise, rooted in his mother’s conviction that he would be deemed unfit for military service due to his limp. Accordingly, José would present himself for medical examination and, in the event that he was declared fit, he would flee to France. To the amazement of all, the army doctor declared him fit for active service. Before he could make plans to cross the border, his mother seized the initiative and arranged for a second examination by an independent doctor, who diagnosed him as suffering from ‘curvature and necrosis of the head of the ­femur’ and ‘progressive paralysis with atrophy’ in the hip – a judgement consistent with Perthes disease. Upon appeal, José was declared ‘fit for auxiliary service’, although this was postponed, with the requirement he report every two years for an army medical examination.46

Free now to focus on his activism, and with the dictatorship tottering under the weight of its internal contradictions, José became one of the ‘Young Turks’47 who played a decisive role in the ascendant protest curve of 1929–31. Following years of clandestine action, these activists emerged from the shadows to overcome their sense of collective trepidation. At times, their protest actions were limited to their neighbourhood, where they felt safer. For example, José and his group stymied plans to build a hermitage in Collblanc. Every time a wall was erected, he and ‘the followers of Atila’ knocked it down until the project was aborted.48

He directed much energy into reorganising the CNT. With his fellow brickmakers and Massoni, he revived the Brickmakers’ Union.49 To organise openly, the impatient brickmakers decided to comply with the existing labour legislation and form a legally constituted professional association. While the veteran Massoni was at the helm, a younger group of activists, including Peirats (who was elected librarian of the brickmakers’ social centre), came to the fore. These youngsters pressurised union leaders to release funds for new activ­ities, including a newspaper. Thus was born El Boletín del Ladrillero, an occasional publication produced by the militants grouped around Peirats and Canela. Reflecting the rapid cultural development of those gathered around El Boletín, they were convinced of the transforming power of the written word and sought to raise the moral level of brickmakers and, in general, to dignify the working-class condition. As Peirats acknowledged:

[W]e endeavoured to instil our members with a social culture. We had swotted up on literature and sociology during the eight-years’ peace of the dictatorship. We hadn’t wasted any time.50

Issue one included José’s first published article ‘La palabra ladrillero, sinónimo de perversión’, a defence of his co-workers while also a fierce attack on the culture of gambling, drinking, and whoring prevalent among young brickmakers.51 If we recall Peirats’s adolescent nights in bars and brothels, he was well informed of the problem against which he rallied. His first writings display many of the qualities that came to characterise his journalism: a keen eye for synthesis and an aversion to the excessive use of adjectives; a preference for direct prose, based on short, clear sentences; the combative title; the vehement and implacable moral tenor and polemical tone; and the unyielding view that misery can be transcended by beauty. As in his later writings, he confidently grappled with a big question; in this case, what he saw as the main cultural problem facing brickmakers. His combative writing style and his refusal to back away from a struggle were in part inspired by his personal fight with the consequences of Perthes disease. He readily conceded to a friend that the ‘inferiority complex’ caused by his leg impairment conditioned his confrontational prose.52

Testimony to his potential as a writer, even at this young age, José was named editor of El Boletín, just months after its launch. This is more remarkable still when we consider that he only started writing in Castilian when he was twenty, in 1928, the same year his first article appeared.53 Though Catalan remained his first language, his readiness to write in Castilian reflected a desire to address the newly arrived migrants and, moreover, to use a language capable of uniting the working class across the Spanish state. Although El Boletín was formally the mouthpiece of a specific occupational sector within the local union movement, given the limited press freedoms of the day, it acquired an echo within the clandestine Barcelona CNT and attracted contributions from some of the leading movement figures, such as Ángel Pestaña and Progreso Alfarache, thereby drawing Peirats into closer contact with prominent cenetistas. Further evidence of his cultural-propagandist inclinations came in 1929, when his short play La Venus desnuda was serialised in El Boletín.54

So what of Peirats’s politics? He can best be described as an inter­nationalist anarchist syndicalist: he was a trade unionist, but this was subordinate to his overriding libertarian aims. This was reflected in the press he read: he subscribed to New York’s Cultura Proletaria, which was produced by Pedro Esteve, an exiled Catalan and former comrade of Anselmo Lorenzo. Meanwhile, Canela received Buenos Aires’s La Protesta, which advocated an ‘anarchist workers’ movement’, a formula associated with the Spanish-born Diego Abad de Santillán (Sinesio Baudilio García Fernández) and his Argentine ally, Emilio López Arango.55 Peirats backed this project of an exclusively anarchist syndicalism, even though it clashed with the ‘one big union’ anarcho-syndicalist conception of those rebuilding the CNT at the time, including his mentor Massoni, who conceived of a less ideo­logical movement. Later, as we will see, in the early 1930s, he broke with this schema after it contributed to a split in the CNT between the supporters of explicitly anarchist workers’ associations and those who wanted ideologically diverse unions.

Besides following debates within transatlantic Hispanic anarcho-­syndicalism, Peirats was fully apprised of the CNT’s internal disputes at this time. He developed a profoundly classist and eminently anarcho-syndicalist dislike of the ideological anarchism of Juan Montseny (Federico Urales). Urales was the founder of La Revista Blanca, the flagship journal of Spanish anarchism, part of what Dolors Marín describes as his ‘publishing enterprise’.56 Peirats saw Urales as ‘an old anarchist converted into a petit bourgeois of libertarian publishing’ – a view that concurred with that of his old school teacher, Roigé, who described him as a ‘parasite [vividor] of ideas’. José also recoiled against Urales’s individualist anarchism, along with that of ideologues like Émile Armand, the French propagandist of ‘free love’ then much in vogue, whose ideas he rejected as ‘almost pure libertinism’.57 Most of all, he disliked Urales’s anti-CNT stance and the ‘poisonous and indiscriminate campaigns against union leaders’.58 Presaging the divisions that would split the CNT just a few years later, the young anarcho-syndicalists were stupefied at news that Federica Montseny (Urales’s daughter and one of the most polemical figures in Spanish anarchist history) had struck a member of a clandestine CNT committee during an argument over money collected by La Revista Blanca in the name of the social prisoners – money that the Urales refused to hand over to the CNT Comité pro Presos (Prisoners’ Support Committee).59 Peirats had a lingering distrust of middle-class anarchist intellectuals and, as we will see, he later clashed with Montseny, who inherited her father’s mantle as the leading theoretician of Iberian anarchism.

With the CNT flexing its muscles after its enforced slumber, the focus of Peirats’s activism shifted into the streets. Years of declining living standards overseen by the employer-friendly dictatorship had left the brickmakers frustrated and, in late 1929, the Brickmakers’ Union declared a strike. Since the dictatorship’s official labour policy was rooted in arbitration courts (the Comités Paritarios – literally, Parity Committees), which forbade direct industrial action, the strike was a frontal challenge to the regime.60 To enforce the stoppage, the Brickmakers’ Union created action squads, of which Peirats was a member. Although deemed unfit for military service, his commitment to the cause compensated for his physical difficulties and, pistol in hand, he served capably in the CNT’s paramilitary squads.61 Distributed strategically across the city, these armed groups, as José explained, were directed at strike-breakers: ‘We stopped them and attempted to dissuade them from committing treasonous actions.’ Sometimes more robust methods were required, such as when José and his group overturned a cart carrying bricks in the street. At twenty-one, he was a ‘man of action’ or, as he described it, one of the ‘nerve cells that set in motion from below the machinery of the CNT’.62 When he later reflected on his motivations at this time, he recalled that:

I was stimulated by revolutionary romanticism… I was attracted most of all by ideological problems. The business of sticking stamps on union cards and assembling the workers to preach to them did not appeal to me. I preferred getting involved in conflicts with the employers and confronting the security forces…63 I was a simple grassroots activist… In our movement, there ­existed two classes: the Areopagites and those who worked hard clashing with the scabs and the cops who protected them. We were the movement’s worker ants who organised and declared strikes, which we sustained with our blows and our coshes; we drew up the ‘demands’ which we later negotiated with the employers.64

The landscape of struggle changed at the end of January 1930 with the ignominious collapse of Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship. Alfonso XIII replaced it with General Dámaso Berenguer’s ‘soft dictatorship’ (‘dictablanda’), which was conceived to manufacture a limited demo­cratic opening capable of saving the monarchy and returning to the political system that had been highly discredited by 1923. Peirats met the new dictator in person as part of the ‘Guiot–Climent Support Group’, which was formed to save the lives of two brickmakers sentenced to death. The case dated back to the robbery and murder of a financial agent in January 1924 by a four-man gang. Only Remigio Climent and Enrique Guiot were detained; the former being found guilty of murder, the latter of being his accomplice. Having refused to reveal the identities of their two escaped associates, both men were sentenced to death in a military court, even though it was unclear ­whether either had fired the fatal shot. After spending three years on death row, in 1927 their sentences were reduced to life imprisonment.65 The ‘Guiot–Climent Support Group’, which included fellow brickmakers Massoni, Canela, and Peirats, then pushed for their release. José even corresponded with Guiot in jail on a regular basis in a bid to raise his spirits. Eventually, General Berenguer received members of the group, including Peirats, led by veteran Barcelona activist, Juan López. While Berenguer only offered vague promises, the collapse of the monarchy a year later ensured the release of the prisoners.66

For Peirats, this was the start of an ‘infernal decade of action’.67 While still involved with his affinity group, Verdad, he was increasingly active in the clandestine CNT, participating in the struggle for the release of social prisoners and for new freedoms that would hasten the union’s reorganisation. He participated in the meetings that drafted the statutes of the Barcelona CNT, which were approved by the civil governor in April 1930. Nevertheless, the most emotive moment in the CNT’s rebirth was the massive rally held in the Paral.lel’s Teatro Nuevo on 27 April. The auditorium, with a capacity for around 2,500 people, could not cope with the human multitude that answered the CNT’s call, and many people had to content themselves with following the speeches on loudspeakers in the street outside. The majority of the speakers were older activists, such as Massoni, Joan Peiró, and Pestaña, the CNT’s general secretary. More inclined to syndicalism, and all of them veterans of the pre-1923 era, these militants had spearheaded the reorganisation of the CNT in the preceding months and were attempting to chart a course through the limited freedoms permitted by the dictablanda.

Tactical differences quickly came to the surface. Divergences were evident over the CNT’s relationship with the wider opposition to the monarchy, which included dissident army officers, renegade mon­archist politicians, socialists, and republicans. Peiró, one of the many activists in contact with the political opposition, came in for fierce criticism for signing a manifesto with republican groups in support of a socially progressive democracy. Urales, always at loggerheads with the anarcho-syndicalists, inveighed against the ‘political’ compromises of leading CNT figures. Yet it was not just the more moderate ­anarcho-syndicalists who flirted with opposition politicians; for instance, Felipe Aláiz, a radical anarchist who later became Peirats’s most important mentor, shared a platform with leading Catalan repub­licans.68 While Peirats had much in common with the anarchist radicals, his social background and his quest for class struggle predisposed him towards the anarcho-syndicalists, and he was intoxicated by his new experiences within the CNT.69

The CNT’s struggle for economic demands resulted in a wave of social mobilisations and strikes during 1930–1 and this increasingly dovetailed with the campaign for political and civil liberties. Beset by its own internal and external contradictions, the monarchy buckled under the weight of the spiralling dynamics of protest that its very existence engendered until, on 14 April 1931, the Second Republic was proclaimed. This momentous event opened up a new phase in Peirats’s life, in which the ‘anarchist family’ would become his real family.