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The split in the anarchist movement and ‘revolutionary gymnastics’ (1931–33)

3.1 The short republican honeymoon

For José, 14 April 1931 began like any other working day: he rose and set off on foot to the Sants brickworks where he was employed. He would have been aware that, two days earlier, municipal elections had been converted by the liberal-left opposition into a plebiscite on the future of the monarchy. With the CNT leadership calculating that the unions would get a better deal under a democracy, many grassroots cenetistas had been encouraged to vote. It is highly unlikely that more anarchist-inclined activists like José, firm in their anti-political convictions as they were, participated in the proceedings. Yet many thousands of workers voted and, in Barcelona and L’Hospitalet, the monarchists failed to win a single council seat. As news spread of the leftist opposition victory in the major urban centres, anti-monarchist crowds took to the streets in a show of pro-republican feeling. By afternoon, José knew something big was in the air when he saw an animated group marching towards central Barcelona carrying the republican tricolour flag. As the hubbub outside grew, he left work and walked a short distance to Gran Vía, a major artery leading to the city centre, where he saw ‘a human wave’ coming from L’Hospitalet.1 Meanwhile, in the corridors of power, profound fissures opened up within the elite. Mindful of the isolation of the discredited monarch, General José Sanjurjo, head of the Civil Guard, respectfully informed the king that his erstwhile praetorian guard would not block a democratic opening. The path was now laid to the proclamation of a republic.

Peirats witnessed emotional scenes as workers from neighbouring barrios converged on Plaza de España to celebrate the demise of the monarchy, what for many was a despised authority structure. Amidst huge popular revelry, people climbed on tram roofs and waved republican flags. Peirats did not join the celebrations, though. Going against the flow of the wave of jubilant humanity descending on central Barcelona, he set off for the CNT’s La Torrassa office, where he met other activists keen to define their position in the face of these momentous events. Peirats and his comrades appreciated the need to gain maximum advantage from what they perceived was a fluid situation. This meant forcing events, in a bid to accelerate history. That afternoon, he was part of a crowd of ‘several thousand’ protesting outside the Modelo prison for the release of the social prisoners, who eventually regained their freedom.2 Later that evening, there was an armed clash between security forces and anarchists, as the latter attempted to seize weapons from a police station near the port. The confrontation left a soldier dead and several civilians wounded, including Conrado Ruiz Vilaró, a close comrade of Peirats, who later died from his wounds. With tensions running high, republican politicians were on the streets trying to defuse the situation, promising further change was possible only through legal channels: ‘It was the same old tune… We knew that their promises would go unfulfilled.’3 As well as promises, the newly ensconced republican ‘revolutionary committee’ hastily formed a ‘security guard’ to augment the public order role of the police and the army.4

With the coming of the Republic, militants like Peirats represented the left wing of the CNT and of the libertarian movement. A strategic-generational conflict developed, as some older activists, whose perspectives were heavily conditioned by the more or less continuing repression to which the movement had been subjected since 1921, were prepared to offer the Republic a degree of leeway, in the hope that demo­cracy would allow for the CNT’s reorganisation. Yet, radicals like Peirats gave no quarter to the new regime. After the enforced interregnum of the dictatorship, they were primed and ready for direct action.

It is naïve to berate these ideologically committed libertarians for not becoming liberal democrats on April 14: they were doctrinally opposed to what they saw as an inherently limited bourgeois democracy that offered formal political equality but left the economic structure of oppression inherited from the monarchy intact. Likewise, in stra­tegic terms, as activists committed to direct action as a means of wresting concessions from the authorities and employers, it made sense to them to build on the ascendant curve of mobilisation that had contributed to the fall of the monarchy. Convinced that the republicans were incapable of advancing the cause of social progress whatsoever, the radicals sought to intensify protest dynamics and channel them towards short-term gains on the road to liberation. They regarded any respite in popular mobilisation as a capitulation to the new author­ities. As Peirats later reflected:

The vast majority of those leftist politicians… were individuals who, because of their mentality and political education, thought that by unseating the monarchists their hour had come.5 The republicans had reached the end of journey and had alighted from the train. For them, the revolution – their revolution – was already a fact. Their main leaders would soon find themselves suckling restlessly at the teat of money. We were now alone on the road to ‘complete emancipation’.6

Nevertheless, he and his associates were optimistic that the republican spring, and the limited political freedom accompanying it, would at least provide them with a new scope to develop their activism. Indeed, during the Republic, the worker-activists of José’s generation came of age. Part of a new mass working class formed by the accelerated industrialisation of the 1910s and 1920s, their youth had prevented them from playing a prominent role in the pre-1923 struggles. As we will see, these younger workers were the major protagonists of the struggles that radicalised the CNT in the prelude to the July 1936 revolution.

The day after the birth of the Republic, the CNT organised a general strike which, according to one militant, was ‘total in Catalonia’, but ‘the atmosphere was one of fiesta, not struggle.’7 Peirats went to the central Barcelona office of the Construction Union, a union that had radicalised during the final months of struggle against the monarchy and that would emerge as the flagship of radical anarcho-­syndicalist practice prior to the civil war, constantly clashing against local employers and authorities. Besides debating the new political situation, the construction activists developed a strategy to defend the most pressing needs of the dispossessed – the struggle against unemployment and high rents.8 It is possible that later that day José was part of a mobile group which toured the city to gather intelligence and seize arms, since he was well informed of the extra guards posted around army garrisons following the clash with security forces the previous day.9

The next major CNT activity in which Peirats participated was the May Day rally, the first celebration of the International Workers’ Day that fell barely two weeks after the birth of the Republic. An inevitably emotive gathering, it was all the more poignant since the CNT had chosen to assemble at the Palacio de Bellas Artes (Palace of Fine Arts), its birthplace in 1910. Now, it proved woefully inadequate for what some estimates suggest were 150,000 workers on the streets. The rally was followed by a demonstration over a two-kilometre route through central Barcelona to the recently named Plaza de la República (now Plaça de Sant Jaume), the site of the city’s main official buildings, where the marchers planned to submit a list of demands to the authorities. Peirats was near the front of the demonstration when he witnessed the peaceful march turn violent. As the square brimmed with demonstrators, shots rang out. There was pandemonium, as people fled for safety. In the mêlée, Peirats was swept away by the movement of the crowd and thrown to the ground, with people running and crawling over him. Bodies piled up on top of him and he found it impossible to get up, struggling for breath, while the shooting con­tinued. He was extremely lucky to escape unscathed: one policeman lay dead and two more were wounded, along with ten workers. Once able to get up, he expected to be surrounded by dead bodies. To his amazement, he saw none, just an array of discarded jackets, hats, shoes, and espadrilles, which was opportune as he had lost his and was able to select a pair that fitted him before walking home to L’Hospitalet.10 This would not be the last time that he would escape alive from potentially mortal circumstances.

The events of that day remain confused. It is certain that there were right-wing gunmen from the Free Unions in the square with the intention of provoking a disturbance. It seems likely that one of their number was identified by a CNT steward, who discharged his weapon, prompting an initial exchange of gunfire. Given the proximity of the Council and Generalitat buildings, the security forces responded, provoking a second, apparently three-way, firefight lasting intermittently for around forty-five minutes, as armed cenetistas took cover in the four corners of the square.11 Another version – which also acknowledges the presence of right-wing provocateurs – suggests that the first shots came from police guarding the Catalan government building.12 It is doubtless, guided by memories of police assassinations of cenetistas in the 1920s, that the situation was defused only with the arrival of soldiers, who were cheered into the square as ‘sons of the people’ and whom, the marchers believed, would not open fire on workers.13

We can only speculate about the extent of Peirats’s involvement that day. He never admitted to being armed, but it is significant that he was at the vanguard of a militant demonstration headed by armed stewards. Moreover, as we know, Peirats had used firearms in the course of his CNT activities and, as we will see, these activities became more frequent. Years later, he acknowledged that he knew that his local barber from La Torrassa was involved in the gunfight, as he recognised the sound of his Smith and Wesson revolver.14 It is also possible that they went to the demonstration together. Whatever the case, in Peirats’s eyes, the events and their violent denouement confirmed his view that the new authorities would, ineluctably, rely on the same repressive apparatus as the monarchy and the dictatorship had and that it was, therefore, struggle as usual.

3.2 ‘The university of La Torrassa’

Behind the noisy street mobilisations, Peirats was one of the thousands of anonymous activists who were busy reorganising the anarchist public sphere that had been largely snuffed out by the dictatorship after 1923. The rapid expansion of this subaltern public sphere after the birth of the Republic reflected the accumulation of social demands in the preceding eight years, when economic, social, and cultural advances had been systematically eroded. The CNT grew vertiginously: by August 1931, it claimed 400,000 members in Catalonia, while the Barcelona CNT announced that it encadred 58 per cent of the city’s workers. Peirats’s Construction Union put its membership at 25,000, while the L’Hospitalet CNT affirmed it organised 9,000 workers out of a total population of 37,650 (almost 24 per cent).15 In fact, since many hospitalenses worked in Barcelona and were affiliated to the CNT there, the total number of cenetistas was far higher.16

There was also a rapid expansion of athenaeums throughout the Barcelona area. Local workers were desperate for culture and, according to one activist, ‘athenaeum fever’ erupted, due to the craving for knowledge.17 In L’Hospitalet, in 1930, 42.5 per cent of men and 54.1 per cent of women were illiterate, while the figures would have been higher still among La Torrassa’s migrant populace.18 Aware that a people without culture would be less capable of taking control of its destiny, José and his group were determined to disseminate the revolutionary ideas they had refined during the dictatorship and bring culture to this most neglected district. Their efforts helped convert La Torrassa into what one expert describes as ‘one of the most important neighbourhoods in the history of Spanish anarcho-syndicalism’19 or, as La Vanguardia described it, a district with a ‘preponderance’ of ‘extremist elements’.20

Before the Republic, the local elite that resided in the centre of L’Hospitalet already viewed the residents of La Torrassa with a mixture of suspicion and condescension. The official view was summed up by a pseudo-sociologist who described torrassenses as being ‘badly adjusted and whose children display extremely high levels of crim­inality and parental neglect’.21 With the creation of an autonomous Generalitat government, La Torrassa was demonised as a ‘decata­lanised’ space, labelled ‘Little Murcia’, home to the stereotypical migrant – the ‘backward’ and ‘savage’ ‘uncultured Murcian’.22 Of all the different groups of migrants from across the Spanish state, Murcians were singled out as the source of all Catalonia’s problems, as the middle-class republicans in the Generalitat, like the Catalan bourgeois patricians before them, adopted a colonial-style mentality towards working-class ‘outsiders’. As always with such panics, the reality was more complex: according to the 1930 census, over 50 per cent of hospitalenses were Catalan; migrants from Murcia and Almería constituting just 18 per cent.23 For Peirats, La Torrassa was a place of hope, ‘a compact town, genuinely working-class, and underdeveloped in every sense’,24 for whom the Republic brought no change to the overarching structure of oppression. The August 1931 outbreak of bubonic plague highlighted the official neglect in the area.25

La Torrassa’s dense network of CNT supporters converted the district into ‘a focal point for social ferment’,26 ‘famous in the sensationalist press for the rebelliousness and the bellicosity of its inhabitants’, and it was here that Peirats focussed much of his activism prior to the civil war.27 He was one of the founders of La Torrassa Rationalist Athenaeum.28 Based in Llançà Street, just a few blocks away from his Collblanc home, the centre was born thanks to the sacrifice of local workers. Peirats and other brickmakers scraped together the rent and deposit for the premises, while carpenters provided desks, chairs, and shelves. Modelled on the Sants Rationalist Athenaeum of his youth, the athenaeum organised evening classes, theatre productions, musical recitals, public talks, and debates and also housed a library. Its meeting rooms were used by local anarchist and neighbourhood groups,29 and along with its supporters, the athenaeum intervened in local community struggles.30

Peirats invested considerable energy in the athenaeum, and its cultural vision closely resembled his ideas.31 In keeping with the notion that the workers had to grasp universal culture, and in contrast to the ‘proletarian culture’ then de rigueur in Stalinist circles, the library included works by Marxist, bourgeois, and even reactionary authors, along with the anarchist classics. Similarly, speakers from diverse pol­itical tendencies were invited to address the athenaeum, with the only prerequisite that they accept open debate with the audience after their talk.32 Highlighting the activists’ democratic approach to the battle for ideas, on one occasion, a public debate was organised with an extreme conservative cleric. Another promoted activity was hiking, which complemented José’s appreciation of beauty as a counterpoint to a lived environment rendered ugly by capitalist urbanism. Hiking was especially popular with younger workers, who could escape for the day to nearby countryside or beaches. Important in its own right given the absence of affordable commercial forms of leisure, hiking also had vital cultural, political, and pedagogical dimensions: groups might discuss important political questions or a previously agreed text. The activists also organised mass picnics, which attracted entire families, with organised games and learning activities for children, while the adults either just relaxed or participated in debates.33 For Peirats, these activities were essential for attracting the youth to the movement, one of his lifelong concerns.34

The athenaeum was an unqualified success and it quickly became an important community institution for all generations, ‘a family home’.35 As Peirats noted proudly, it embellished the everyday life of the dispossessed and, for this reason, ‘we swept the neighbourhood along with us.’36 Weekend plays were particularly well attended, drawing audiences of over 200. Soon, the athenaeum was attracting people from neighbouring Barcelona and it was obliged to relocate to bigger premises in nearby Pujós Street, whereupon its activities were expanded.37 Nevertheless, according to one participant, the new space was, at times, too small for the number of people who attended the most popular functions.38 To evade repression, the activists also operated under the name Amigos del Arte Escénico, which organised theatre and film events right up until the civil war.39

The majority of L’Hospitalet’s anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist activists passed through the doors of the athenaeum. This played a pivotal role in shaping the culture of the local CNT, and it reaffirmed the essentially proletarian nature of movements whose most prom­inent militants and ‘leaders’ were, like Peirats, invariably working-class autodidacts. Fiercely loyal to the movement that formed them, and unlike the salaried ‘professional revolutionaries’ of the communist parties, these activists remained within the world of labour – their direct experience of poverty and their profound awareness of ­working-class problems bringing them respect from their fellow workers.40 They constituted, therefore, a vital linkage between the movement and the rest of the working class and were central to CNT struggles. Of the many activists ‘schooled’ in the athenaeum, Diego ‘Amador’ Franco – later described by Peirats as ‘our prodigal son’ – stands out.41 Born in Barcelona in 1920, he was an apprentice carpenter and had attended evening classes from around the age of eleven, progressing to write both journalism and poetry, for which he revealed much talent. Active in the anarchist youth movement – the Juventudes Libertarias (JJ. LL. – Libertarian Youth) – at the age of thirteen he joined the revo­lutionary militias during the civil war, after which he fled to France. In 1946, he returned to Spain to revive the clandestine anarchist movement only to be detained and tortured, before being executed a year later, in 1947, aged twenty-seven.42

For all its success, the athenaeum, which depended on financial contributions and donations from its far-from-wealthy supporters, led a precarious existence. Despite this adversity, the organisers were creative: library books were routinely ordered from local publishers, the bills then going ignored.43 Thus they acquired a significant collection of books from the leading publisher Espasa-Calpe, including its celebrated encyclopaedia.44 But most of all it was the tireless labour of Peirats and his group who, no more than twenty strong, worked ‘like devils’ in their spare time to keep the athenaeum alive.45 In Peirats’s case, he gave talks, taught, acted, directed plays, applied make-up to fellow actors, painted stage sets, and even wrote a play. Any surplus generated by the athenaeum’s activities was either used to fund new initiatives or was donated to other causes, such as the CNT Prisoners’ Support Committee, which took care of social prisoners and their families. The organisers expected no personal gain other than the satisfaction of participating in a work of collective creation.46 Peirats was deeply enamoured with a forum that allowed him to give full vent to his cultural and aesthetic energies, particularly his love of theatre and song.47 In this sense, as a form of cultural activism grounded in everyday life, the athenaeum allowed him to live out his desires. Within the obvious constraints imposed by work commitments, he could live anarchically while cultivating alternative cultural visions in opposition to the mainstream in ways that presaged later developments in post-World War II Beat and libertarian countercultures. This was much in keeping with his revolutionary goals and his belief that the building blocks for future mobilisations had to be rooted in neighbourhood activism. Rather than seeing revolution in simple insurrectionary terms, for José it was a socio-cultural process rooted in attitudinal change. He was then a cultural missionary, attempting to consciously transform his local environment, along with the collective experience of those around him. As a result, the athenaeum was a communitarian experiment that generated new socio-cultural practices; it advanced a non-hierarchical way of life, part of a bid to fashion a new everyday life based on new emotions and values rooted in human self-expression and cooperation.

Through the athenaeum, Peirats became known locally as a ‘conscious worker’, one of ‘those with ideas’ who, through their own individual self-determination and personal conduct, set an example to those around him.48 Therefore, he now rejected ‘vices’ such as gambling and smoking and, unlike in his teenage years, he prided himself on rarely imbibing alcohol. While this may have been personally gratifying for Peirats, there is a sense in which his intense activism possibly impeded him from developing intimate relationships with the opposite sex. While his social activities provided him with interpersonal skills that enabled him to develop relationships with males and females of varying ages (‘quite a few girls’ attended the athenaeum in La Torrassa49), his autobiographical writings reveal a degree of timidity that resulted in unfulfilled or undeclared loves.50

In the first year of the Republic, still just twenty-three, Peirats started addressing CNT public meetings. Typifying the CNT’s loosely structured nature, he learnt of his new role as a public speaker walking down a street in La Torrassa, where he saw a poster announcing he was to speak at a meeting. After hurried preparations, he channelled his considerable nerves into a tirade against the republican authorities, which he accused of defrauding the hopes of the people. He concluded defiantly, stating how, despite growing repression, the CNT would vanquish its enemies to ‘forge a new Spain’. Soon, Peirats found himself addressing CNT meetings across provincial Catalonia. Although he never considered public speaking his forte, relying on notes even later in life, he was capable of improvisation, such as when he arrived at Mollet del Vallès, twenty-five kilometres from Barcelona, to find the mayor had banned the meeting. Rather than face a fruitless journey home, he organised an impromptu meeting in the town square, concluding just in time to avoid the security forces.51

3.3 Radicalisation:

The ‘man of action’ in the streets

The clampdown by the authorities on the anarchist public sphere presaged a new stage of social struggle in which Peirats’s status as a man of action was consolidated. Social radicalisation was inseparable from the growing internal struggle within the ‘anarchist family’. The advent of the Republic exacerbated long-standing strategic and tactical fissures between the CNT’s anarchist, anarcho-syndicalist, and more syndicalist-inclined factions over the relationship between revo­lution and democracy. For the anarchist radicals, the way forward was through insurrectionary street mobilisations that would imbue the masses with the confidence to topple capitalism and the state. This contrasted with the syndically-focussed approach of the anarcho-syndicalists, who believed that revolution would come through powerful unions inside the workplace. Meanwhile, the syndicalists, who were grouped around Pestaña and those of his ilk and who had been most affected by state and employer repression, were more concerned with gradual economic improvements and were losing sight of the ultimate revolutionary goals championed by the other two factions.

These divisions were often described, albeit inaccurately, as a struggle between treintismo and faísmo. The more moderate treintistas took their name from an anti-insurrectionary manifesto signed by thirty prominent cenetistas in August 1931.52 Consisting mainly of older anarcho-syndicalist activists, including Massoni, they believed the Republic offered new opportunities to consolidate CNT structures. The radicals, meanwhile, were incorrectly named after the Federación Anarquista Ibérica (FAI – Iberian Anarchist Federation), the exclusively anarchist secret organisation formed in 1927 to preserve libertarian purity inside the CNT and coordinate the activities of the myriad anarchist affinity groups scattered across Iberia. The FAI would become the great, frequently irrational, fear of the republican authorities. This position was most identified with the Nosotros affinity group, which included Francisco Ascaso, Buenaventura Durruti, and Juan García Oliver, the mythical ‘three musketeers of Spanish anarchism’ who, after World War I, emerged as the prototype for the urban guerrillas that spearheaded the defence of the CNT in the face of spiralling state repression. From the start of the Republic, Nosotros impelled the insurrectionary line, advocating ‘pendular insurrectionary actions’, armed uprisings that would impede the domestication of the proletariat within the ‘parliamentary fiction’ and create a ‘revo­lutionary gymnasium’ to prepare workers for the armed overthrow of capitalism.53 Anything else, such as the more union-centred ­anarcho-syndicalist approach of the treintistas, smacked of reformism that distracted workers from their revolutionary vocation.

Tensions between the two factions grew during the ‘hot’ summer of 1931, when a wave of CNT economic strikes met with accelerating state repression, which sealed the radicalisation of workplace activists and members of the Comité pro Presos, who were most sensitive to the repression. The turning point in relations between the two factions and between the Barcelona CNT and the authorities came after a general strike on 4 September. The stoppage, in support of a hunger strike by social prisoners, many of whom were interned without trial, lasted seventy-two hours and affected around 300,000 workers in the Barcelona area. The authorities responded with a show of strength that included soldiers on the streets, martial law, and the deployment of warships in the port, leaving sixteen workers dead, three of whom might have been summarily executed in police detention.54

As the CNT was further radicalised, so too was Peirats, who attended clandestine activist meetings. His disposition and youth placed him closer to the maximalists, as did his activism in the Construction Union, which followed or, perhaps more correctly, advanced, the radical line. Nevertheless, in La Torrassa, Peirats was at loggerheads with prominent radical Francisco Tomás, who typified the insurrectionists’ maximalism. Some eight years older than Peirats, Tomás was a true militant, a born speaker. Yet he was cunning and bent on proselytising, and bore no respect for any other influence than his own. He had earlier encouraged his small band of followers to boycott the ‘reformist’ Rationalist Athenaeum, as they abhorred cultural initiatives and preferred violent street actions. Meanwhile, the supporters of the athenaeum saw Tomás’s group as ‘a handful of demagogues’, for whom the revolution was ‘just around the corner’; practitioners of what Peirats mocked as ‘tavern communism’ and ‘ballsy anarchism’.55

As far as the CNT’s internal division is concerned, therefore, Peirats and his group occupied an uncomfortable position between the two factions. While Peirats was an anarchist in the streets and in the athen­aeum, he was very much an anarcho-syndicalist in the workplace, and this convinced him that the revolution would come through a combination of cultural awareness and revolutionary strikes as opposed to simply firing pistols, like the radicals appeared to believe.

With the breach between the two factions heading towards a split in the unions, Peirats remained unwavering in his commitment towards the CNT. He played a decisive role in the December 1931 brickworkers’ strike.56 The strikers sought to achieve their long-­standing goals – the abolition of piecework and the disappearance of the contractors who exploited the day labourers. This, they hoped, would result in a stable wage structure and would allow them to deal directly with their employers, not the contractors, who were seen as a parasitic strata benefitting from the system of payment by results. José was part of the four-strong strike committee and, when the employers refused to negotiate, he joined armed teams that went out to ‘hunt “scabs”’ – an activity that was not without risks since strike-breakers often benefitted from a police escort. Given the strength of the CNT locally, persuasion alone was often enough to encourage workers to join the strike. Employers were less easily convinced. As the strike dragged on, the CNT relied more heavily on its traditional direct action tactics and Peirats became involved in more audacious activities, including arson attacks on several brickworks. Although he never commented on this issue, it is likely that Peirats was now a member of the CNT’s defence groups (grupos de defensa).57 In one incident, he led a group that disarmed a security guard before burning a workshop. Curiously, despite addressing the guard face-to-face, Peirats did not wear a mask, which can be interpreted either as recklessness or as a measure of the confidence felt by cenetistas in a neighbourhood where they held considerable power.58 Perhaps, however, it was felt they could rely on fear alone, since a guard at another local factory had recently been assassinated.59 Finally, the employers returned to the negotiating table, at which Peirats was also present. The brickmakers achieved a partial victory: the employers agreed to dispense with the contractors but the system of piecework would remain. It was an outcome, nonetheless, that was seen as a considerable advance by most brickmakers.60

After the conclusion of the strike, Peirats started working as a baker – a change of profession occasioned by continuing leg pains. In some cases, the consequences of Perthes disease lead to an explosion of severe pain in the early to mid-twenties. For Peirats, this pain seemed unbearable at times, and his condition was further aggravated by the freezing cold of the brickworks. Worsening unemployment, however, meant his new job as a baker drew him into new social struggles. In response to the economic crisis, the CNT practised ‘union impositions’ (imposiciones sindicales), whereby it sent the unemployed into those workplaces that offered overtime to employees or those which the union deemed were in need of more workers to cover production. This policy was part of an ongoing trial of strength with the employers and periodically led to confrontations and arrests. At his union centre, José was directed to a bakery whose owner had a reputation for hostility towards the CNT. He duly entered the bakery and casually set to work, explaining to the employer and his wife, to their consternation, that the CNT had sent him. Tellingly, the couple were impressed by Peirats’s good humour and hard work and invited him back. This work experience proved invaluable and, ironically, he ended up getting some more baking work in the kitchen of the Modelo prison.61 Peirats could just as easily have been a detainee there, for just a few weeks after becoming a baker, he initiated what he later described sanguinely as ‘a chapter in my life as a terrorist’.62 This was part of a struggle by CNT bakers to achieve their historic demand: the abolition of night work and a 5 a.m. start that would allow them to spend the night at home and shake off their ‘death’s heads’ (caps de mort) nickname.63

The bakers also had health and safety demands, since ‘90 per cent of the bakeries were disgusting underground rooms, humid and replete with cockroaches and rats.’ When employers resisted, the union established a ‘war committee’ (comité de guerra). José duly volunteered and, along with other younger bakers, was at the forefront of the conflict. There followed a series of small bomb attacks on bakeries before the employers’ association accepted the CNT’s demands, excluding the need for a strike. Yet some employers refused to accept the deal and victimised the activists. When the union boycotts of these bakeries proved unsuccessful, militants resolved to give them a ‘fright’ (susto). Armed with pistols, Peirats and a comrade visited one employer who had victimised CNT bakers to ‘persuade’ him to change tack. On another occasion, he and a couple of comrades bombed a bakery, making their escape after a brief exchange of gunfire with security guards from a nearby factory.64 Such was the aggressive stance of L’Hospitalet bakers that local employers complained to the authorities about the spiral of violence.65

Peirats’s activism also centred on his new affinity group, known simply as Afinidad. Formed around the time the Rationalist Athenaeum opened in 1931, this ‘propapaganda and action group’ included his brickmaker friend Canela, as well as other like-minded young an­archists, male and female, who had met in local athenaeums and rationalist schools. Totalling around fifteen members, Afinidad, like all such groups, was rooted in strong neighbourhood and personal relationships; for instance, there were three couples in the group. Among the group was Pérez, a pistol-wielding youth, not ‘one to mess with’, who was a close friend of Peirats and his family, for whom he was ‘like another son’. In terms of orientation, the group conjoined a variety of activist approaches: some members were more anarcho-­syndicalist and others dedicated themselves to cultural activities through the athen­aeum; some rejected violence entirely, while a subgroup – which included Canela, Pérez, and José – ‘accepted everything’. As we will see, this was not always the case, and they mainly dedicated themselves to acts of sabotage during strikes. While it is understandable that José was somewhat guarded about the group’s specific actions, he did refer to what was perhaps its most spectacular action, the collapse of electricity lines outside L’Hospitalet during a general strike.66

By 1932, José was, as he subsequently described himself, ‘a kind of wannabe intellectual [intelectualillo] and premature terrorist [terrorista en agraz]’. His activism shifted according to the changing fortunes of the movement, operating publicly when possible, yet ready to step forward to defend the CNT using all necessary means. In his case, this was made easier since at this time he was yet unknown to the police, so he felt comfortable keeping a small arsenal in his room at home. As he reflected years later, not without humour and possibly with a degree of exaggeration: ‘My mother couldn’t open one of my drawers without shrieking at finding a grenade or a couple of pistols.’67

While it is clear that young Peirats had a penchant for violent struggle, in keeping with his commitment to anarcho-syndicalist practice, these armed activities were intimately linked with concrete, day-to-day union struggles and the moral certainty that they would improve the lot of his fellow workers. The same cannot be said of the three insurrections organised by the radicals during the republican years. While these uprisings tapped the growing disenchantment of the dispossessed with the Republic, Peirats was fiercely critical of them due to their wholly negative consequences for his beloved CNT.68

3.4 The cycle of insurrections’:

Internal schism and demoralisation

The first uprising occurred in January 1932 in Alt Llobregat, an isolated mining district in northern Catalonia. Localised and easily contained by the army, the authorities used the insurrection as a pretext to deport over 100 revolutionaries from across Spain to the Canary Islands and Spanish territories in Saharan Africa.69 Among the deportees were Durruti and Ascaso, probably the two most high-profile advocates of the maximalist position, and Canela, Peirats’s closest friend and comrade in Afinidad.70 Although Canela did not participate in the uprising, he had a police record and had been detained on several occasions since the birth of the Republic, which meant the authorities were happy to get him off the streets.71 Peirats’s love for his friend was channelled into a righteous indignation against both what he saw as the ‘authoritarian’ republican state and the fruitless insurrectionary tactic.

The fallout of the rising and the deportations brought tensions between the CNT’s rival factions to a head. Although the moderates had no prior knowledge of the insurrection, the radicals berated them for not supporting the movement; meanwhile, the moderates criticised what they saw as the radicals’ reckless adventurism. The gulf between the two factions was exacerbated by the vendetta of the Montseny family towards the moderates, led by some of the Barcelona cenetistas who, during the dictatorship, as mentioned above, had questioned their authority to collect money in the name of social prisoners as unaccountable middle-class publicists. The charge was led by Federica, whose contempt for anarcho-syndicalism was such that she joined the CNT only in 1931. Known disparagingly among her critics as ‘Miss FAI’, Montseny directed her ire against the union moderates in family publications, such as La Revista Blanca and El Luchador, creating the climate for the most serious split in the union’s twenty-year his­tory.72 As we will see, this conflict between proletarian, autodidacts, and middle-class intellectuals would be repeated later during the civil war and in exile, when Peirats frequently crossed swords with Montseny.

In what was the first but not last CNT schism that José would witness, one might be forgiven for assuming he would be an unconditional supporter of the radical position. His temperament, his style of activism, his youth, and his experiences in La Torrassa, where the moderates had few supporters, all inclined him towards the radicals, as did his friendship with Canela, who had introduced him to Ascaso, one of the leading advocates of the insurrectionary line.73 Likewise, Peirats’s first pamphlet, Glosas anárquicas (Interpretación anarquista de la historia), was a contribution to the movement’s internal debates at this time and constituted a sustained attack on the ‘organised’ trade unionism of French theoretician Pierre Besnard, then de rigueur with moderates like Pestaña.74 Although we cannot be certain of its publication date, Glosas anárquicas probably appeared in late 1931 or early 1932, when Peirats was twenty-four, and he revealed great sympathy for Hispano-Argentinian Abad de Santillán’s idea of an exclusively anarchist workers’ movement, which guided many of the radicals and the FAI.75 Yet he also outlined his conviction that a future revolution hinged on ‘educational propaganda and incitements to individual perfection’, through which ‘we can heat up the atmosphere while we educate the people in a revolutionary fashion, raising its cultural baggage.’ This led him to criticise ‘theatrical conspiracies’, which he saw as ‘irreconcilable with our libertarian principles’.76

While Peirats’s activism deepened after the CNT split, he nevertheless refined his position. By mid-1933, when it was manifest that the pursuit of an anarchist workers’ movement had provided justification for a split and the expulsion of revolutionary syndicalists and anarcho-syndicalists from the CNT, he rejected the idea of ideological purity in the unions.77 With hindsight, he appreciated how the ­moderates ‘saw things more clearly’ when it came to the need for revolutionary organisation, even if they committed ‘the mistake’ of exaggerating republican freedoms. Despite a small minority of the moderates (essentially the pestañistas, who later formed their own political party, evolving towards reformism), the majority consisted of activists with ‘positive values’, such as Joan Peiró, a lifelong anarcho-syndicalist and, ironically, a FAI member. These activists had not become ‘traitors’ or ‘counter-revolutionaries’ overnight, as demonstrated by their event­ual return to the CNT in May 1936. As for the radicals, Peirats was ­appalled by the intolerant ‘FAI sectarianism’, their exaggeration of the revolutionary inclinations of the masses, and their ‘absurd’ insurrectionary ‘adventures’.78 Unlike the leading protagonists on both sides of the split, Peirats lacked the petty, insular spirit required for an inter­necine conflict.79 If, in terms of the theory that guided him, Peirats was an anarchist (he claimed that ‘I have always considered myself more anarchist than syndicalist’80), his practice remained firmly grounded in the anarcho-syndicalist axiom that the CNT should preserve the unity of all those dedicated to anti-state revolution.81

Years later, with the obvious benefits of hindsight, Peirats concluded that, notwithstanding the genuine divisions of the early 1930s, ‘a third way’ could and should have been found to avoid the split.82 Some CNT Regional Committees, Asturias being just one example, remained in the confederation with an orientation very similar to that of the moderates expelled from the Catalan unions.83 Equally, militants like Eusebi Carbó, who had long represented the most anarchist currents inside the CNT, saw the uprisings as ‘pure Bolshevism’, ‘a cold uprising decreed by order of a circular’.84 A participant in the 1915 El Ferrol anti-war congress, Carbó later rallied against the pro-Bolshevik current inside the movement and, while by 1931 he had embraced anarcho-syndicalist positions, he was clearly no reformist – although he would later occupy positions in the Catalan government during the war. Others rejected the insurrectionist road as it stymied the cultural struggle that would prepare the masses for a future revolution.85 Peirats and the rest of Afinidad belatedly backed this middle road,86 yet such voices were drowned out by the schismatic clamour of the radicals, who blocked all reasoned debate.87

Towards the end of 1932, Peirats’s decision to leave L’Hospitalet and the family home provides evidence of his disillusionment with developments inside the Barcelona CNT. Certainly, this move also reflected the worsening economic crisis, which badly affected the construction industry and associated industries like brickmaking. The split in the CNT had reduced its muscle, making it harder for its unemployed activists to get work.88 As a twenty-four-year-old, Peirats doubtless sought adventure too, so he accepted an invitation from his uncle Benjamín to return to his birthplace in La Vall d’Uixó, where he found work as an agricultural labourer. He retained a deep emotional attachment to Benjamín and La Vall, ‘that uncomplicated world, with its aromatic mountains and its pure blue sky… the fertile nature, without fake adornments and almost bereft of traitorous hypocrisy’. Agrarian labour relations were less idyllic, as José discovered upon entering the miserable world of the rural working class. Despite hopes the Republic’s agrarian reform would improve the lot of the rural dispossessed, José was forced to stand in the square (­hacer plaza) while foremen selected the strongest looking hands from a multitude of hungry workers. The experience of rural work changed his perspectives and, years later, he still viewed the agrarian issue as ‘the most urgent of all problems’. Even though he would have a long and exhausting working day, José still found the energy to run evening classes in his uncle’s house. When alone, he and his uncle, a lifelong socialist, had long, amicable debates about politics, each defending their respective position – Benjamín accusing the anarchists of ‘doing the work of the Right’ by destabilising democracy and José denouncing the Republic’s repression.89

This repression increased after the second anarchist insurrection of January 1933. Although organised across a wider terrain – armed incidents occurred in Andalusia, Aragon, Catalonia, Madrid, and Murcia – like the first rising a year earlier, it was quickly snuffed out by the authorities. This was unsurprising. As prominent anarchist youth organiser Fidel Miró observed, following the split, the CNT was ‘losing power, both in terms of its membership and its revolutionary impetus’.90 The rising was the action of an armed vanguard with no real connection with the masses. Peirats later wrote how people were ‘cold, indifferent or afraid, holed up behind their doors’.91 With no organised anarchist presence in La Vall, José followed the march of the movement through the pages of the CNT daily, which he received from Madrid on the days it passed the state censor. Although he had grown attached to the village and its people, after a few months, by early March, the agricultural work dried up and he was restless. For a while, he worked in an espadrille workshop, as his parents had done before him, but the lure of Barcelona, his family, and his comrades – all that gave meaning to his life – was ever more powerful.92

His return to Barcelona marked the start of a new stage in his activism. He completely immersed himself in the organisational life of the anarchist movement, then in open crisis following the second failed uprising of January 1933, which had heightened internal conflicts. These conflicts caused Peirats great personal distress when the wrath of the radicals fell on Massoni, his first important mentor in anarcho-syndicalism and fellow brickmaker and one of the last signatories of the treintista manifesto to remain in a position of influence inside the CNT. Massoni evoked tremendous compassion in CNT circles due to the injuries inflicted upon him by right-wing gunmen, which left him unable to continue working as a brickmaker. In 1930, Massoni was elected administrator of Solidaridad Obrera, a position he occupied with great diligence despite the difficult financial and political circumstances and for which he was later re-elected. After signing the treintista manifesto, however, Massoni became the target of the ire of radicals in the print-workers union, the Sindicato de Artes Gráficas (Graphic Arts Union), whose campaign against him led to the deterioration of his precarious health. The tragic denouement came at the Regional Plenum of the Catalan CNT held in Barcelona on 5–13 March 1933, where Massoni was so unwell that a comrade had to read his report and respond to radical accusations that he had misappropriated funds.93 While there was no evidence to support such claims, Massoni was forced to resign from Solidaridad Obrera. For a noble activist who had given everything to the movement, this was a bitter moral blow and he suffered a heart attack in the middle of the plenum.94 With their erstwhile comrade on his deathbed, the radicals issued a manifesto denouncing Massoni as the spokesperson of all ‘splitters’.95 He fell into depression and died weeks later, having devo­ted most of his forty years to the CNT.96

His death coincided with the most violent phase of the split, which saw armed clashes between treintistas and radicals, as they disrup­ted each other’s meetings with coshes, knives, and pistols. Although Peirats was above the mêlée and had maintained his friendship with Massoni, the moderates identified him with the maximalist position; so, when he and Canela attended the funeral, they were forced to leave without having the chance to bid farewell to their mentor. For Peirats, this was a bitter reminder of the pointlessness of this fratri­cidal schism.97

Meanwhile, in L’Hospitalet, the CNT was effectively now run by the radical Tomás and his cronies. From their insurrectionist perspective, Peirats and his associates were little more than culture-obsessed reformists. As for Peirats, Tomás’s witless maximalism, coupled with his blundering sectarianism, embodied everything that was wrong with the radicals, whose futile uprisings only served to undermine the CNT, the anarchist movement, and the cultural initiatives he so valued.

Afinidad now rallied to change the movement’s orientation. During Peirats’s time in La Vall, Afinidad voted to join the FAI in an explicit bid to counter this ‘insurrectionary adventurism’.98 In par­ticular, they opposed what they saw as the unaccountable vanguardism of the Nosotros group of Durruti, Ascaso, and García Oliver, whom they blamed for implicating the entire movement in their military fantasies.99 Like other groups, Afinidad believed the uprisings were minority actions of armed groups on the fringes of the movement. According to one prominent Barcelona faísta, ‘A considerable number of FAI militants were appalled by their constant use of demagogy and found their coup-style practices less acceptable still.’100 Once in motion, the insurrections presented the movement with a fait accompli, leaving activists conscious of their moral obligation to show solidarity. In effect, Nosotros benefitted from a glorious myth, in no small part fuelled by anarchism’s internal culture, which revered all that was secret and clandestine. This enabled its members to exert a charismatic authority over key sections of the CNT and the FAI. Yet, while Nosotros was publicly identified with the anarchist movement, frequently invoking its name, Afinidad correctly noted they had no democratic mandate from grassroots assemblies for their insurrectionary politics.101 Afinidad sought to open up a debate on the viability of armed struggle and to gauge the extent to which the CNT and the FAI actually endorsed the insurrections. For Peirats, this was the first of a series of occasions in which he would find himself in direct opposition to the movement’s ‘leadership’. Indeed, according to one critic of Nosotros, Peirats was ‘the main defender’ of the thesis that the group had to be isolated.102

Afinidad similarly rejected the armed fundraising tactics that were central to the radical repertoire. For the radicals, expropriations were another front in the growing insurrection against the existing order that also provided vital funds to purchase arms for their ‘revolutionary gymnastics’. Likewise, armed fundraising offset the decline in dues-paying members inside a fractured CNT, at a time when there was intense pressure on the funds of the Comité pro Presos to assist the rising numbers of social prisoners caused by the insurrections. Meanwhile, for those affinity groups inspired by the anarcho-­individualism of Max Stirner, expropriations allowed them to finance their activities and constituted an alternative to paid work – something that clashed frontally with the worker ethos of Afinidad, who shared the anarcho-syndicalist belief in payment for a job well done.

Peirats’s rejection of expropriations was rooted in ethical and strategic considerations. We saw earlier that, in the 1920s, he subscribed to Buenos Aires’s La Protesta, which was co-edited by López Arango, a brilliant organiser and anarchist propagandist, whose denunciations of ‘anarcho-banditry’ cost him dearly: he was gunned down at home in front of his wife and children by a member of the Severino Di Giovanni affinity group.103 Peirats’s direct experiences with Barcelona’s expropriators confirmed his hostility to this practice. Through Ginés Alonso, Afinidad member and co-founder of La Torrassa’s athenaeum, Peirats was introduced to the anarcho-individualist Ágora affinity group, of which Alonso was also a member. After several meetings with Ágora, Afinidad voted to break with what Peirats described as a ‘club of libertines’,104 whose fondness for smoking, drinking, and aversion to work was a world away from his strict conception of proletarian morality and ‘the dignity of flaunting callused hands’.105 The logic of Ágora’s actions was later writ large in a bungled armed robbery at a bar that left one waiter (and trade unionist) dead and most of the group, including Alonso, in jail.106

Afinidad’s frustration with the radical line turned to exasperation following the third insurrectionary essay, which started on 8 December 1933. It later became evident that the Barcelona police had prior warning of the action.107 Peirats witnessed first-hand the abysmal organisation of the rising in L’Hospitalet, one of its main foci. Those Afinidad members who specialised in direct action assembled at Canela’s flat with their pistols to discuss their stance in advance.108 The notable absentee was Pérez, always the boldest of the group, who was part of a team that had successfully executed an audacious plan to liberate inmates from the Modelo prison by digging a hole from the sewers into the building. Though opposed to the rising, as men of action, Peirats and the others were eventually drawn to the streets by the sound of gunfire and the knowledge that their comrades were fighting the security forces. Before midnight, they took to the streets individually, aware the police would be less likely to stop individuals. Peirats later confessed to being motivated by his curiosity to see the ‘revolution’ play out.109

He was singularly unimpressed. Confirming his view that revolution was impossible if the masses were unprepared, he witnessed insurrectionists hammering on doors to rally people, manu militari: ‘Women and children to their beds! Men to the streets! The revolution has broken out!’ When calls went unheeded, the insurgents became contemptuous: ‘The Spanish people live in a chicken coop! With these materials, we can’t do anything!’ Events shifted from comedy to near tragedy, when José was almost killed in an incident that underscored the rising’s shambolic nature. A previously agreed password had been circulated among activists to enable them to identify one another in the streets.110 Fearing the watchword had been leaked to the police, some insurrectionists unilaterally created a new one. With the electricity supply cut off and the streets in total darkness, Peirats spotted an armed group ahead of him and took cover in the doorway of a building, before calling out the password he had been given. He was greeted by ‘a shower of bullets’. When he repeated the call, he was met with ‘the same categorical response’. Since he was drawing pistol fire, he knew this was ‘friendly fire’ rather than the Civil Guard. After some anxious moments, he used his knowledge of the streets to extricate himself from immediate danger. Moments later, he was confronted by rifle fire. Fearing arrest by the security forces, he hurriedly buried his pistol in a plot of wasteland just before being detained by nervy civil guards. Despite claiming he was returning from a girlfriend’s house, he was marched to a nearby café that served as a temporary detention centre, where he found mainly young males, including several comrades. Hours later, after being registered by the authorities, he was released and went home. Concerned he was now on the radar of the local police, he cleared his room of incriminating materials and, for the next few nights, slept at an aunt’s house. His fears were indeed well founded, for the police came to search his parents’ house, seizing anarchist newspapers.111 He was now, therefore, known to the authorities as an anarchist.

Many Barcelona anarchists were hostile to these risings, convinced that the masses were unprepared.112 Peirats and Afinidad were left with a ‘disastrous impression’ of what they saw was a ‘catastrophic’ insurrection.113 In a letter to Aragonese anarchist Francisco Carrasquer, José explained the problem of revolution by decree: ‘One day a comrade would approach you and whisper in your ear, “The insurrection is tonight.”’ On a military level, there was no overarching plan: ‘Each group would fire into the air to proclaim the revolution without a genuine strategy worthy of the name.’114 Instead, it was simply an attempt to ‘make revolutionaries by force’.115 One participant described the rising as ‘a crazy dream… the people weren’t ready’ and the consequences left many ‘people demoralised’.116 Beside the fatalities, the repressive aftermath saw activists imprisoned and a comprehensive clampdown on CNT activities. The L’Hospitalet unions were forced underground and only properly reorganised in early 1936.117 Claims that these uprisings prepared the masses to defeat the military coup of July 1936 are disingenuous.118 As Peirats later observed, the repression weakened the CNT greatly in key areas where the December 1933 rising had been strong (Zaragoza, La Rioja, and western Andalusia), and these zones quickly fell to the military rebels at the start of the civil war.119 Meanwhile, Tomás, whose maximalist discourse did most to prepare the climate for the uprising in La Torrassa, was expelled from the L’Hospitalet CNT after his actions failed to match his vali­ant words: on the night of the rising, he was curiously absent from the streets and his comrades later found him at home. However, there was no immediate change in the L’Hospitalet CNT’s orientation, as Tomás was replaced by Josep Xena, a rationalist teacher sympathetic to the insurrectionist position.120

In what was a critical juncture in the movement’s history, Afinidad redoubled its campaign against ‘anarcho-syndicalist Jacobinism’.121 Reflecting a growing grassroots rejection of the radical stance, Peirats had been elected secretary of the Barcelona Local Federation of the FAI in the summer of 1933, while Canela was voted in as secretary of the Catalan Regional Committee of the FAI a year later, in April 1934. This left Afinidad members occupying the two most important positions in the anarchist movement in Catalonia.122 Committed to pursuing a ‘constructive’ approach to revolution, Peirats and Canela summoned the architects of the risings – the Nosotros group of Durruti, Ascaso, and García Oliver – to a meeting for them to justify their position to the rest of the movement.123 Given the repressive climate, this clandestine assembly was organised in the countryside outside Barcelona. To Peirats’s stupefaction, the ‘three musketeers’ did not show: ‘There were good comrades, modest, willing, selfless people, but none of the grand figures who roused the masses in meetings as they spoke in the name of the FAI.’124

Peirats called Nosotros to the next FAI meeting, where he intended to propose their expulsion. This time García Oliver and Ascaso attended. Peirats’s plan was hindered upon discovering, to his amazement, that ‘the big stars… without belonging to our organisation, have used its name as a scarecrow and they dragged it into every mess they could find!’ Nosotros, moreover, displayed a lofty arrogance towards their critics. Besides refusing to change their insurrectionary path, they defended their freedom to act unilaterally as they were not FAI members, despite invoking the organisation’s name. Peirats was no pacifist, either. As Barcelona FAI secretary, he organised arms smuggling across the French border via Puigcerdà, conscious that the anarchist movement would not achieve its ultimate aims with words alone.125 Still, he was adamant that democratic accountability was ­vital if these long-term goals were to be attained and that they were endangered by the tendency of Nosotros to trample on the norms of the movement, as it sucked everyone into a repressive vortex.

By now, Peirats was a totally committed activist, with experience across the diverse trade union, cultural, paramilitary, and, more specifically, anarchist wings of the movement. Yet, most of all, he was concerned with readying the workers culturally for revolution. In a world shaped by the forces of consumerism and individualism, some may struggle to appreciate he was motivated neither by personal ambition nor careerism. His was a transforming activism: he wanted to assist the anarchist movement achieve its higher, altruistic goals that would, so he believed, benefit the rest of humanity. In the course of this activism, he was prepared to risk both his freedom and, indeed, his life. If he believed he had much to offer to the movement, this was always couched with humility; indeed, at key moments, as will be seen, those around him had to push him to take new responsibilities. Nevertheless, when he overcame his diffidence, he went on to emerge as one of the most talented propagandists and writers of his generation.