The Early Years

The decade following the “Tragic Week” opens the mature period of Spanish Anarchism, when the movement assumed massive dimensions and fully developed its tactics and organizational forms. At this time we also witness the emergence of the CNT, the largest of the libertarian organizations that were to play a role in the Spanish Civil War.

The maturing of Spanish Anarchism was a complex process of rounding out earlier methods of struggle which had been used too one-sidedly, almost to the exclusion of all others. During the period of the International, the Anarchists were trying to find their way to a coherent body of theory and practice, and their influence on the laboring classes of Spain was very limited. This was probably the most experimental period in the early history of the movement. Its methods—the general strike tactic combined with local insurrections—could be deployed only on a very small operational stage, against an historic back-drop dominated by Federalism. By the 1880s and early 1890s, Anarchist tactics had veered over to a policy (influenced largely by the Andalusians) of local insurrections, culminating in the Jerez uprising. Then another shift took place, this time to the atentados and conspiratorial activities of the 1890s. Throughout this period, moreover, there were always Anarchists who emphasized the less dramatic tasks of propaganda and union organization. In time, all of these tactics began to fall together and were no longer regarded as mutually exclusive. Having exhausted the possibilities of using any one method as a panacea, the Spanish Anarchists now began to unite them as diverse elements in the totality of Anarchosyndicalism. The general strike was combined with local uprisings, a steady barrage of propaganda, direct action by individuals or small groups, and dogged union organizing, each flexibly deployed to reinforce the others. It is this resilience, ttiis uncomplicated, free-wheeling combination of tactics, that accounts in great part for the remarkable growth of the movement in the years to come. The main problem now was to evolve libertarian forms of organization capable of encompassing this wide range of tactics and of promoting their use on a national scale.

Such organizational forms ripened gradually, almost unconsciously, nourished by the disintegration of social and political institutions in Spain. After 1909, the constitutional system became so weakened by internal political divisions that neither effective repression nor satisfying reforms could be undertaken. Maura had genuinely tried to buttress the oligarchy and crush the labor movement. He had attempted in June 1907 to undermine popular suffrage and lessen the influence of the caciques by establishing “corporate” vote-granting electoral privileges to institutions and limiting those of individuals. The Liberals and Republicans were alienated by this policy; to them it seemed to portend a drift toward a monolithic Conservative regime. Seven months later, when Maura’s minister of the interior, La Cierva, presented a “Terrorist Law” that gave special provincial juntas sweeping powers to suppress Anarchist “terrorists,” suspend their periodicals and exile labor militants, almost all opposition opinion in Spain was aroused.

The Liberal Party, more mindful than the Conservatives of the need to neutralize revolutionary discontent with concessions, formed an alliance with the Republicans to unseat the ministry. When the Liberal Moret replaced Maura as premier on October 21, 1909, he was publicly committed to a less repressive program. In November, four Anarchists charged with rebellion in the “Tragic Week” were removed from military jurisdiction and turned over to civilian courts. A few days later, martial law was lifted in Catalonia. Finally, a general amnesty was declared for the imprisoned rebels of July. This less oppressive atmosphere continued into the following year, when Moret was replaced by the Liberal Jose Canalejas, whose ministry was avowedly oriented toward reform and greater political freedom.

The Catalan labor movement now began to reemerge. On December 18,1909, Solidaridad Obrera held a special assembly to piece the organization back together. It was attended by delegates from only twenty-seven unions with pledges of adherence from an additional forty—a substantial decline from the 108 that were represented in its April assembly eight months earlier. The membership of the labor federation had dropped from 15,000 to about 4,500. A pathetically defensive atmosphere prevailed at this gathering. The delegates were at pains to disclaim any official connection with the general strike of the previous July or any ideological association with Ferrer. In June Solidaridad Obrera had entertained hopes of expanding the Catalan regional federation into a national organization; now, these optimistic plans seemed quite remote. “Without doubt,” notes the Anarchist historian, Jose Peirats, “the tremendous repression culminating in the Montjuich shootings retarded the confederal crystallization.”

Within months, however, the tide once more began to turn in favor of the formation of a national confederation. The decline of Solidaridad Obrera after the “Tragic Week” had at least one favorable aspect: the more moderate labor leaders had withdrawn for a time, giving freer play to Anarchist influence. This influence was strengthened by the rehabilitation of Ferrer’s name. The injustice of the charges against him, followed by the drama of his martyrdom, produced (in Diaz del Moral’s words) “an exaltation of syndicalism and of anarchism in the peninsula.” Finally, strong sentiment for a national confederation began to build up within unions outside of Catalonia, where Maura’s repression had been less severe.

On October 30, 1910, delegates from local confederations throughout Spain convened at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Barcelona for an informal three-day exchange of views and experiences. It was at this gathering, called by the reconstituted Catalan Labor Confederation (the regional organization of Solidaridad Obrera), that a decision was finally made to establish a new national labor confederation: the National Confederation of Labor (Confederation National del Trabajo)—the famous CNT. The movement really got underway at the CNT’s first congress, also held in the Bellas Artes, between September 8 and 11 of 1911. By this time a surprising unanimity of opinion in Anarchist ranks favored the establishment of the new organization. Owing largely to the efforts of Anselmo Lorenzo, many Anarchist Communists of Tien a y Libertad began to express the need to work in mass labor movements. The new Confederation, to be sure, was still very small: the delegates represented no more than 30,000 members in some 350 unions throughout Spain. But discussion was animated, and a lively spirit pervaded the proceedings.

We must pause here to examine how this new labor organization was structured. The CNT was built up organically, initially around the Catalan Regional Confederation (Confederation Regional del Trabajo de Cataluna). Later, other regional confederations were established from local unions in each province until there were-eight by the time of the Second Republic. The national organization was in effect a loose collection of regional confederations which were broken down into comarcal (local and district) confederations, and finally into sindicatos, or individual unions. These sindicatos (earlier known by the dramatic name of sociedades de resistencia al capital—societies of resistance to capital) were established on a vocational basis and in typical syndicalist fashion grouped into local and trade federations (federaciones locales and sindicatos de oficio). To coordinate this structure, the annual congresses of the CNT elected a National Committee whose primary functions were correspondence, the collection of statistics, and aid to prisoners.

The general secretary of the National Committee and the secretaries of the Regional Committees were the only paid officials in the Confederation. During the first few years, the post of general secretary was occupied by Jose Negre. In contrast to its Socialist rival, the CNT shunned any manifestation of bureaucracy and centralization. It relied primarily on the initiative of its local bodies, comarca, and regional confederations to carry out the work of the organization. No strike funds were established. Strikes were expected to be short, and if necessary, violent as befitted a revolutionary organization whose primary aim was the overthrow of capitalism. The purpose of the CNT—or so its Anarchist militants believed—was to keep alive the spirit of revolt, not to quench it with piecemeal reforms and long, attritive strikes. Regular funds were established, however, for aid to prisoners and their families, and to some degree for “rationalist schools.” There have been few unions more concerned than the CNT with the defense of its imprisoned members and the cultural, spiritual, and moral elevation of the working class. The phrase emancipation integral de los trabajadores (integral emancipation of the workers) recurs in all the leading documents of this extraordinary organization.

How did the CNT function? For part of the answer we may turn to the statutes of the Catalan Regional Confederation, which established the guidelines for the national movement as a whole. The organization was committed to “direct action.” It rejected all “political and religious interference.” Affiliated comarcal and local federations were to be “governed by the greatest autonomy possible, it being understood by this that they have complete freedom in all the professional matters relating to the individual trades which integrate them.” Each member was expected to pay monthly dues of ten centimes (a very small sum), to be divided equally among the local organization, the Regional Confederation, the National Confederation itself, a special fund for “social prisoners,” and the union newspaper, Solidaridad Obrera.

The Regional Committee—the regional equivalent of the CNT’s National Committee—was an adminstrative body. Although it played a clearly directive role in coordinating action, it was bound by policies established by the annual regional congress. In unusual situations, the committee was obliged to consult local bodies, either by referendum or written queries. In addition to the annual congress of the national movement, a regional congress was to be held every year at which the Regional Committee was elected. The statutes contained no provision for the recall of the Committee members—a significant omission—but extraordinary congresses could be held at the request of the majority of local federations. Three months’ notice was to be given to the local federations before a regular congress was held “so that they may prepare the themes for discussion.” Within a month before the congress, the Regional Committee was obliged to publish the submitted themes in the union newspaper, leaving sufficient time for the workers to define other attitudes toward the topics to be discussed and instruct their delegations accordingly. The delegations to the congress, whose voting power was determined by the number of members they represented, were elected by general assemblies of workers convened by the local and comarcal federations.

In practice, the CNT was more democratic than these statutes would seem to indicate. There was a throbbing vitality at the base of the organization, a living control and initiative from below. The workers’ centers (centros obreros) which the Anarchists had established in the days of the International were not merely the local offices of the union; they were also meeting places and cultural centers where members went to exchange ideas, read, and attend classes. All the affairs of the local CNT were managed by committees staffed entirely by ordinary workers. There were no paid officials, of course. Although the official union meeting was held only once every three months, there were “conferences of an instructive character” every Saturday night and Sunday afternoon. The junta of the local union characteristically included a president, several vice-presidents and secretaries, a small battery of “accountants” to keep a watchful eye on the funds, and a librarian.[21] The solidarity of the sindicatos was so intense that it was not always possible to maintain an isolated strike in a locality. There was always a tendency for one strike to trigger off others in its support or generate active aid by other sindicatos. This was especially true of strong Anarchist centers like Saragossa, where the movement had established deep and vitaf roots.

Obedience to the wishes of the membership was a cardinal rule. At the annual congresses, for example, many delegations arrived with mandatory instructions on how to vote on each major issue to be considered. If an action was decided upon, none of the delegations which disagreed with it or felt it was beyond the capacity of its membership was obliged to abide by the decision. Participation was entirely voluntary. Quite often this voluntaristic approach led to all the practical results imputed to centralization—but without the need for creating the same deadening structural forms. On other occasions, it led to sporadic, ill-timed outbursts, easily crushed by the government. But such outbursts were usually due to overconfidence on the part of the CNT’s local unions, a zealousness that could only be corrected by experience.

In 1911, the CNT was still very immature, and its radiant optimism about its prospects very nearly had disastrous results. No sooner had the congress established a national confederation when it secretly decided to call a general strike in support of strikers in Bilbao and as a protest against the war in Morocco. The action was scheduled for September 16—only five days after the founding of the CNT. The general strike started in Saragossa and spread rapidly to Gijon, Valencia, and Seville. Partial strikes also broke out in Oviedo, La Coruna, Malaga, Santander, and other cities. In Cullera, a town near Valencia, the general strike exploded into full-scale insurrection. The workers took over the community for several hours and in the course of the uprising killed the mayor and a judge. In Madrid the movement was aborted by the Socialists, who used their influence in the capital to prevent a strike from getting underway. Surprisingly, no strike developed in Anarchosyndicalist Barcelona, where the CNT had held its congress only a few days earlier. There, the authorities had been alerted to the strike plans by Sanchez Villalobos Morena, the brother of Miguel, who had helped constitute the strike committee of July 1909. On the night of September 15, the Barcelona police rounded up five hundred CNT militants or cenetistas (as members of the organization were soon to be called) and, with the cooperation of Lerroux, who regarded the union as a rival of the Radicals, managed to stop the strike movement.

Canalejas, the Liberal premier, reacted energetically. Troops were moved into all the major cities and the entire country placed under martial law. The CNT’s centros obreros were closed down, along with the Casas del Pueblo of the Socialists, whom the government suspected of planning to support the strike. The Anarchist press was suspended and a partial censorship imposed on other periodicals. Arrests of labor militants were made everywhere. Heavy sentences were meted out to those strike leaders who could be found. With this began the first flight (to be repeated many times) oicenetista militants to France. On January 10, 1912, five Anarchists were given death sentences for their part in the Cullera uprising, but these were commuted to life imprisonment. The last of the group, Juan Jover Ferrer (“Chato de Cuqueta”), was spared the garrot by Alfonso XIII who was now eager to curry favor with the left.

The CNT went underground. Its press disappeared and its membership dropped precipitously. Canalejas, who had been welcomed as a reform-oriented premier, began to curb the entire labor movement, even alienating the moderate Socialists and Republicans. To break a railway strike in 1912, Canalejas drafted 12,000 of the workers into the army. The Liberal premier was to pay dearly for his energy. He was shot to death in the Puerta del Sol, the main plaza of Madrid, by a young Aragonese Anarchist, Miguel Pardinas. Pardinas, whom Buenacasa knew personally as a mild-mannered, inoffensive boy, took his own life to escape capture. With the repression of the movement came a new wave of atentados. In April of the following year, another young Anarchist from Barcelona, Jose Sancho Alegre, tried to kill Alfonso XIII at a military parade in Madrid. Although the attempt failed, Sancho Alegre was condemned to death. Again the indulgent monarch commuted the sentence.

By degrees, the fortunes of the Anarchosyndicalist movement began to change, although it was to grow slowly in the next few years. In 1913, Canalejas’s successor, the Liberal premier Romanones, declared an amnesty for all imprisoned offenders in the general strike of September 1911. The CNT still remained an illegal organization, however. It had originally been banned by the judiciary of Barcelona, and the courts refused to revoke their decision. But the intrepid union conftnued to function in the underground, still conducting strikes and carrying on agitation in the factories.

The outbreak of the First World War divided virtually all the working-class organizations north of the Pyrenees. The defection of outstanding Anarchist leaders like Kropotkin, Grave, and Malto to the Allied side, followed by a small number of Spanish Anarchists and their periodicals, shocked the movement, which came out overwhelmingly against the war. “Rather than war—revolution!” cried the Ateneo Sindicalista of Barcelona in a manifesto written by Antonio Loredo and signed by hundreds of organizations. Tierra y Libertad remained fervently internationalist, advocating an antiwar position from the very outset of the conflict.

Buenacasa was convinced that the defection of Kropotkin and other leading figures in the international Anarchist movement hastened the death of Anselmo Lorenzo. In any case this grand patriarch of Spanish Anarchism died on November 30, 1914, having devoted almost a half century to the libertarian movement. The CNT, whose formation had meant so much to Lorenzo, numbered no more than 15,000 members at the time. By 1916 the labor organization had recovered sufficiently to publish Solidaridad Obrera as a daily newspaper, but the movement was still subjected to severe harrassment. The Anarchists’ militant antiwar position greatly displeased the authorities. Although Spain remained neutral, its ruling classes were emotionally committed to the belligerents and profited greatly by the continuation of the war.

In the spring of 1915, the Ateneo Sindicalista of Ferrol tried to hold an international antiwar congress, an event which attracted delegates from Portugal, Brazil, and other countries, including representatives of Socialist youth groups in France. Eduardo Dato, the Conservative premier, fearful of offending the warring powers in Europe, banned the meeting shortly after the delegates arrived, but the ban did not prevent the Catalan cenetistas from holding a clandestine conference of their own with a view toward rebuilding the badly fractured CNT.

To the Spanish masses, the war had brought jobs and a certain amount of economic improvement. But it had also brought a spectacular price inflation which outstripped the increases in wage earnings, particularly for unskilled and semiskilled workers. Once again a wave of dissatisfaction began to sweep the country. This time disaffection developed not only among the workers but also in the Spanish army, middle classes, and industrial bourgeoisie. The social situation in Spain began to take a very curious turn. The Conservative and Liberal parties had virtually dissolved into factions, making the old parliamentary system increasingly unmanageable. The army, riddled with dissatisfaction, had begun to form Juntas de Defensa. This was a system of councils which seemed to resemble the workers’ syndicates, at least in their demands. They asked for seniority in promotions, pay increases, and the right to bargain with the government for overall improvements in the military service. Their chief, Colonel Marquez, was regarded as a simple, honest soldier with Republican sympathies who desired not merely army reforms but an end to oligarchic rule and caciquismo.

By 1917 a strange spectacle was unfolding: the army, banished decades earlier from politics to almost everyone’s relief, was now being wooed as the hope for political regeneration. The industrial bourgeoisie, irked by economic restrictions and high taxes, began to see the military as a possible lever for overthrowing the landowning oligarchy and taking political power for itself. Francisco de Asis Cambo, the Catalan industrialist and leader of the Lliga, established contact with Colonel Marquez, to be joined by Lerroux and a variety of Republicans, Radicals, and Catalan Conservatives. The linkage extended to the labor movement by means of alliances that had been cultivated between the Socialists and Republicans. For the first time, Spain seemed to be working toward a loose coalition of conservative industrialists, middle-class Republicans, petty-bourgeois democrats, and, through the Socialists, a major labor federation. This agglomeration of basically hostile elements was’ united by a fixed desire to overthrow the landowning rulers of the state and establish a freely elected Constituent Cortes that would write a new, enlightened Constitution for Spain.

To what extent was the CNT drawn into this curious bloc? The Anarchosyndicalist union found itself involved to the degree that it was committed to common action with the UGT. The CNT, it must be emphasized at this point, was not homogeneous in its outlook. It contained a strong syndicalist tendency, represented by Salvador Segui, the general secretary of the Catalan Regional Confederation, and later by Angel Pestana, the editor of Solidaridad Obrera. Both men believed in Anarchism as a social ideal and were unquestionably individuals of great sincerity and capacity for sacrifice, but their practical views were shaped by day-to-day issues and organizational exigencies. They placed a strong emphasis on the need for immediate gains, often at the expense of their libertarian principles. Moving increasingly into opposition to them were the more principled Anarchists, who were concerned mainly with the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of a libertarian society.

Segui was eager to promote cooperation with the UGT. It is likely that he found practical Socialists like Pablo Iglesias and Largo Caballero more compatible than the “zealots” of Tierra y Libertad. By late 19J6, the idea of establishing a working cooperation between the two great labor organizations seemed irresistible. The political parties were in shambles; the manufacturers and oligarchy were more deeply divided than ever; the unions were growing rapidly; and the army’s loyalty to the crown seemed equivocal. Massive discontent existed among the workers over the soaring cost of living. What could be more natural than to establish a cooperative relationship within the union movement?

This prospect began to take on practical dimensions when an assembly of the CNT in Valencia decided formally to explore opportunities for joint action with the UGT. After an “exchange of impressions,” the two organizations established a working agreement which came to be known as the “Pact of Saragossa.” The agreement centered primarily around economic issues: the CNT and the UGT decided to call on the government to reduce the cost of living by curbing monopolists, speculators, and food exporters. A plan was drawn up to initiate a series of escalated actions to reinforce these demands. The movement reached its culmination when on December 16, 1916, the two labor organizations carried off an impressive twenty-four-hour general strike throughout Spain to protest rising prices.

By the summer of 1917, the link between the two unions was becoming increasingly political. The time had come for the manufacturers, the Republican middle-classes, and the Lerrouxistas to be catapulted into direct confrontation with the oligarchy. In June, Dato, the newly appointed premier, responded to the mounting revolutionary threat by dissolving the Cortes and suspending constitutional guarantees. The Catalan deputies, called back to Barcelona by the Lliga, thereupon declared themselves to be a National Assembly with the mission of renovating the entire political structure of Spain. The assembly managed to collect about seventy deputies out of 760 and hold twb secret sessions before it was dispersed by the police.

At this point, the government shrewdly decided to provoke the labor movement into premature action. Dato’s intention was fairly clear: to stampede the Lligistas back to the governmental camp and quell the maturing revolutionary unrest among the workers before it went too far. The occasion for this ploy arose when the railroad workers of the Compania de Ferrocarriles del Norte in Valencia decided to go out on strike. Why the strike occurred is unclear. It is quite possible that it was the work of an agent provocateur, although it may have also been the result of the hopes produced by the assembly of parlimentarians in Barcelona. In any case, the government counseled the company to take a firm stand against the railroad union, an affiliate of the UGT. Although the Socialists managed to get the workers to return to their jobs, the company provoked a crisis by refusing to take back forty-three militants. The railroad workers thereupon walked out again.

Feeling had now risen to a fever pitch in nearly all the working-class districts of Spain. In Vizcaya, 25,000 metallurgical workers had walked out, supported morally and materially by the miners of the region. The Socialists found themselves in a desperate position. Convinced that a general strike was doomed to failure owing to lack of sufficient preparation, they had managed to persuade the CNT to call off all strike actions in Barcelona. At the same time, grossly mistaking the intent of the government, they had threatened it with a general strike if the forty-three railroad workers were not given back their jobs. This threat, which the Socialists were convinced would suffice to cow the government, was precisely what Madrid wanted. Moreover, it was generally regarded by the tJGT rank and file as the opening shot in a social revolution. Everyone was straining at the leash, but this time the leash was held by the UGT leadership, and was rapidly slipping from their hands.

The general strike was called on August 13, and in most areas it was smashed within a few days. Heavy fighting had broken out in a number of cities, particularly in Barcelona, where the CNT reluctantly honored its agreement with its Socialist allies. Barricades went up in the Atarazanas district and the sharpest encounters occurred when the strikers tried to keep the trolleys from operating. Significantly, the troops came out on the side of the government, raking the streets with machine guns and artillery. They even accepted Civil Guard officers as commanders. Officially, the fighting left seventy persons killed, hundreds wounded, and some two thousand arrested. Martial law was declared throughout Spain. But this time, the main burden of the repression fell on the Socialists: Largo Caballero, Anguiano, Besteiro, and Saborit were arrested and received life sentences. In the following year, however, they were elected to the Cortes by working-class majorities and freed in the general amnesty that followed the period of repression. On the whole, Dato had shown more determination in quelling the labor movement than Canalejas—and several years later he was to pay the same price as his Liberal predecessor.

The strike proved to be entirely political, its demands influenced not by Anarchist ideas but by those of the Socialists. The CNT program in Barcelona for example, went no further politically than a demand for a republic, a militia to replace the professional army, the right of labor unions to veto (not enact) laws, divorce legislation, the separation of church and state, and the closing of churches “for a certain period.” Economically, the union asked for a seven-hour day, a minimum’ wage of four pesetas daily, the nationalization of the land, the abolition of piecework, stronger child labor regulation, and sojorth. In demanding a plebiscite for declarations of war, the program ironically stipulated that “those who voted for it... be enlisted first.” However moderate these demands, at least by Anarchist standards, they did not placate the bourgeois parliamentarians in Barcelona. Predictably, the Lliga and its allies completely deserted the labor movement.

The general strike of August 1917, however, marks a turning point in the modern history of Spain. It finally sealed the alliance of the Catalan bourgeoisie with Madrid: henceforth, the Lliga and its wealthy industrial supporters were openly to subordinate their autonomist visions to brute class interests. To the Catalan bourgeoisie, the main enemy was to be the Catalan proletariat, not the landowners of Castile and Andalusia. Thus was created the social setting that eventually would lead the manufacturers of Barcelona into the arms of General Franco.

The Postwar Years

The end of the European conflict brought an economic crisis to Spain—and nearly four years of bitter social war. The contraction of the wartime market, together with the closing down of shipyards, steel plants, mines, and the withdrawal of land from cultivation, produced widespread unemployment in the cities and countryside. Intent on reducing wages, the manufacturers began to gird themselves for a struggle with the unions. To this end they were prepared to use lockouts, the black-listing of union militants, the sindicatos libres (the so-called “free unions,” many of which the employers promoted as substitutes for the CNT) and, as we shall see later, private gangs of gunmen—the pistoleros—-to intimidate and kill union leaders.

The main target of this offensive was the CNT. The labor organization had emerged from the war years and the general strike stronger than ever: by 1919, the CNT numbered fron 600,000 to a million members. It had absorbed nearly all the older and established unions in Catalonia whose prudence led them to resist entry into Solidaridad Obrera and its predecessors. This expansion of the Anarchosyndicalist union after the failure of the August general strike is highly significant. In the past, Anarchist-influenced unions were easily repressed. After each defeat, they either emerged weaker than before or disappeared entirely. Now the CNT had not only survived major government attacks but had grown into a formidable revolutionary force in Spain.

To a large extent, the growth of the union can be attributed to the intransigence of the Catalan bourgeoisie. The militancy of the manufacturers evoked a corresponding militancy in the working-class; the failure of political methods promoted antipoliticism and direct action. Certainly this had occurred before, but in the past it had always left the effectiveness of repressive measures undiminished. Obviously other factors had now emerged which promoted the growth of the union despite vigorous efforts to destroy it.

The most important of these was the postwar revolutionary crisis of 1918–20. The Spanish laboring classes shared the sense of exhilaration that swept over the world with the success of the Russian Revolution. The fact that the Czar had been overthrown, followed by the Bolshevik takeover—an insurrection that proclaimed Socialist ideals—produced wild enthusiasm in every comer of the peninsula. The ruling classes were terrified. “The imminence of a political revolution,” writes Diaz del Moral, who lived through those upheavals, “worried even the most optimistic.... The clear vision of these events and the examples of eastern Europe animated all of the proletarian strata with hopes of victory. At this point, the most potent labor agitation in the history of our country was initiated.”

This agitation reveals the considerable role Anarchist militants played in fostering the CNT’s growth and giving it a revolutionary direction. In the winter of 1918 a national Anarchist conference was held in Barcelona to define a common policy toward the CNT. The union, it was agreed, could not be regarded as an Anarchist organization in the strict sense of the word. But it was decided that the CNT should be a major arena of Anarchist activity. Anarchists throughout Spain were urged to enter the union and proselytize it. “The results of the conference in Barcelona could not have been better,” observes Buenacasa. “Within a few months, all the entities of the CNT were perfectly penetrated by the Anarchist spirit and idea.”

Buenacasa’s conclusion, however, should not be too hastily accepted, as witness the results of the congress of the Catalan Regional Confederation (the famous “congress of Sans”) convened in Barcelona on June 28,1918. This four-day assembly was attended by 164 delegates, representing some 73,860 members in twenty-seven local federations. So important were the decisions of the congress to the future development of the CNT that they must be examined in some detail.

The syndicates were completely restructured on what, in the United States, would be called an “industrial basis.” Until the congress of Sans, the workers in the same factory had been divided among separate, independent craft syndicates, based on trades; now they were to be organized as a sindicato unico, uniting all the workers of the same enterprise in a single union. This reorganization did not eliminate all of the established craft unions in the CNT, a number of which still persisted in areas dominated by the craft-oriented UGT, nor did it eliminate representation by trades within the sindicato unico itself. Workers of different skills were grouped into trade “sections,” then united in a common industrial union.[22] In an industrial dispute, all the sections acted as a single entity. The sindicato unico formed the basis of the Catalan Regional Confederation and of the unions that were to enter the CNT in the future. By uniting the skilled and unskilled in a single enterprise, the unions not only increased their fighting power but also made it possible for the poorly paid, unskilled workers to exert a radicalizing influence on the better-paid craft elite.

To further stiffen the militancy of the union, the congress reaffirmed its opposition to cajas de resistencia, or strike funds. This stand met with general approval. As Pestana declared, the “Catalan worker from time immemorial has always resisted the cajas de resistencia because he felt that this dulled his desire to struggle....” At the same time, Pestana recognized that many employed members would probably want to levy a contribution on themselves—as they had done in the past—to aid strikers in major labor conflicts. Such arrangements, however, had to be made privately, not within the union structure. And if there were to be no cajas de resistencia, militant tactics would be necessary to settle strikes. At the same time, however, the congress of Sans articulated its commitment to direct action with prudence— merely as a “preferred means”—and only indirectly expressed its opposition to political methods. It refrained from declaring its support for comunismo libertario. As Buenacasa disapprovingly noted, the congress “did not endorse a frank declaration of libertarian principles.”

Yet suprisingly, when the delegates took it upon themselves to elect a new National Committee (at least until the next national congress) they chose Buenacasa as secretary general and Anarchists such as Evelio Boal and Vincente Gil as secretaries, Jose Ripoll as auditor, and Andres Miguel as treasurer. “These five,” notes Buenacasa, “constituted themselves into an Anarchist group and, in line with their ideas, they oriented the Confederation until the Congress of Madrid” (the second national congress of the CNT in 1919).

The regional congress of Sans, in effect, regarded itself as an interim national body. Its authority to do this, and its choice of a temporary National Committee composed exclusively of Anarchists, may seem as questionable as it was ambiguous. But the Catalan gathering had been inspired in great measure by Anarchist Andalusia, where a regional confederation had been established on May 1^st in a congress at Seville. It was at this Seville congress, in fact, that the sindicates unicos were adopted for the first time by a Spanish syndicalist union, paving the way for their acceptance in Catalonia and finally by the CNT as a whole. Since Catalonia and Andalusia were now in close contact, the Catalans were doubtless confident that their actions reflected the wishes of the labor federation as a whole.

At this time the south was in a fever of expectation. Gone were the memories of the defeats suffered at the turn of the century, of the 1905 famine that had starved out the very spirit of agrarian rebellion. Signs of a recovery were already evident in the spring of 1913, when a congress at Cordoba had led to the founding of the Federation National de Agricultores (FNA). Generally, the success of this new organization had been modest although it succeeded in holding regular annual congresses up to 1919, when it dissolved into the CNT. Most important of all, it had won the greater part of Murcia and Valencia to the libertarian fold and provided a springboard for steady agitation to promote the simple demand of the reparto: “The land for those who work it!”

With the outbreak of general strikes in the north and the success of the Russian Revolution, an intoxicating wave of hope swept through the south initiating the Trieno Bolchevista or “Bolshevik Triennium” of 1918–20. The popular writings of Sanchez Rosa, Kropotkin’s famous Conquest of Bread, Medico’s To the People! together with periodicals like Accion of Seville, La Voz del Campesino of Jerez, and Solidaridad Obrera of Valencia, began to inundate the countryside. Sanchez Rosa personally conducted a propaganda tour of the region, followed by Diego Alonso, Higinio Noja, and Francisco Cabello, to mention only a few of the popular Anarchist speakers of the time. By December 1919, a major campaign had been launched to sweep Andalusia into the CNT. Local newspapers were started up in dozens of towns, and a stream of Anarchist speakers, pamphlets, and leaflets flowed through the south.

Diaz del Moral, who witnessed the effects of this Anarchist propaganda at first hand, describes it with great verve and color:

Those who were present at the time in 1918–19 will never forget the astonishing spectacle. In the fields, in the shelters, and in the courtyards, wherever peasants gathered to talk, to everyone’s recurring delight there was one topic of conversation that was discussed seriously and fervently: the social question. During the smoking breaks during the day and at night after supper, the most educated would read the leaflets aloud while others listened with great attention. Then came the perorations, corroborating what had been read and followed by unending praise. They did not understand everything; some words they did not know; some interpretations were childish, others malicious, depending upon the personalities involved; and basically all agreed with each other. How could it be otherwise? For they had all heard the pure truth that they had experienced all their lives, even though they had never been able to express it! Everyone read continually; curiosity and thirst for learning was insatiable; even along the roads, the horseback riders read on their animals leaving reins and halters trailing; when they packed their food, they always put a pamphlet into their sacks.

The account, written after the upsurge had subsided, is inadvertently patronizing. Similar descriptions can be found in the writings of travelers to Paris on the eve of the Great Revolution: the cab driver holding slackened reins while his eyes devour a seditious pamphlet; the soldier on guard duty avidly poring over a radical newspaper; the heated discussions in the Palais Royal, in the narrow streets, and in the cafes. In the case of France, however, this was taken as evidence of the harvest produced by the “Enlightenment” and as testimony to Gallic civilization; in the case of Spain, it was regarded as “fanaticism” and “infantile millenarianism.” The point is that Andalusia in 1918–19, like France in the 1780s, was teetering on the brink of revolution. The prudent Cordobese lawyer had come face to face with the insurgent Cordobese peasant—and he was frightened.

In all revolutionary situations, the sedition spreads rapidly. So it had been in France, and so it was in Andalusia. In Diaz del Moral’s account, we get not only the facts but also the fears of the privileged classes, who saw this movement only as a terrible contagion spreading across the land:

Within a few weeks, the original nucleus of ten or twelve adepts expanded into one or two hundred; in a few months, almost the total working population, captured by ardent prosleytism, frantically propagated the flaming ideal. The obstinate few who resisted either for reasons of discretion, passivity, or for fear of losing their status, would be harassed on the hillsides as they plowed the furrow, in the cottage, in the tavern, in the streets and squares by committed groups with reasons, with imprecations, with scorn, with irony, until they agreed, for resistance was impossible. Once the village was converted, the agitation spread to those nearby; it sufficed for a worker of one pueblo to speak to a comrade of another. In all jases, the effect was successful; with more or less ability, all were agitators. Thus the fire spread rapidly to all ‘combustible’ villages. The propagandist’s task was easy; it sufficed that he read an article from Tierra y Libertad or El Productor for the hearers, like those of Fanelli in Rubau Donadeu’s guest room, to feel themselves suddenly illuminated by the new faith.

Then would come the strikes. Many of them exploded spontaneously, sweeping in everyone from day laborers and craftsmen to the house servants and wet nurses of the privileged classes. Stores would close, the cafes would empty, and the fields would go untended. If provoked by the Guardia there might be violence—rioting, acts of incendiarism, the killing of watch dogs and cattle. Quite often, however, nothing would stir; an eerie silence would descend upon the entire town. Although many of these strikes would raise specific demands (and in 1918, Diaz del Moral tells us, the majority of them wgre successful), others were strictly revolutionary. The strikers would pose no demands. Their purpose was to achieve comunismo libertario. When at last it was clear that this was not to come, the strikes would end as suddenly as they had begun, and everyone would quietly return to work. Then the town would wait for the next opportunity. The swollen groups would shrivel back to a small nucleus of devoted revolutionaries until another upsurge swept across the land.

The coming of the CNT gave these agrarian movements greater cohesion. The union established a centro obrero in each town and created permanent organizational forms with regular meetings and experienced organizers. In time, even the most isolated towns developed large, reliable memberships and became linked to other communities by regional conferences and newspapers. This was a vitally important advance. In the past, strikes had been sporadic, often doomed to failure by isolation. In later years, they were to be linked together into great provincial movements, sometimes leading the way for the cities, sometimes reinforcing urban struggles. Speakers from the large cities and occasional visitors from abroad would tour the centros obreros, bringing the culturally starved country people into living contact with the most talented individuals in the movement. Here would come the theoreticians of Anarchism, its most capable organizers, its most renowned journalists. These would be great moments, like important holidays, when enraptured audiences would listen to the newest ideas or heatedly debate the most objectionable policies. Then there would be periods when the local speakers, each in turn, would expound “the Idea” in all its nuances to neighbors and friends.

Local newspapers played a major role in this development, not only by informing and coordinating the agrarian movement, but also by providing the braceros and peasants with a source of expression. CNT and Anarchist periodicals were remarkable human documents. They were filled with letters—some barely literate—from all parts of the district. The sindicatos unicos would post notices of their activities; individual braceros and peasants would discuss a host of issues ranging from politics to morality; experiences would be exchanged, and, of course, there would be news of all important events that concerned the interests of the laboring classes. The periodicals, in short, were living organs; their readers devoured them avidly and wrote to them frequently. Devoted Anarchists might subscribe to a number of papers: usually Tierra y Libertad or one of the Solidaridad Obreras, several of which were published in the large cities. In addition there were scores of local newspapers to choose from in Andalusia alone. These periodicals were supplemented by pamphlets and books on geography, history, science, and agronomy, as well as social issues, and included morally elevating dialogues, poems, and novels. Many of them were printed in very large editions on cheap paper and usually sold for a fraction of a peseta.

In Andalusia and the Levant the sindicato utiico usually embraced the entire town, bringing together workers, craftsmen, peasants, braceros, and even shopkeepers in a single union. Thus any strike involved everyone to some degree and usually took on the proportions of a general strike. In small communities, the Sunday meetings of the sindicato were simply village assemblies. Anyone was free to attend, to speak and vote on the topics at issue, which often included not only union business but all the affairs of the community. Women participated as freely as men. Between the weekly assemblies, the adminstration of the community’s affairs was vested in the Junta del Sindicato and its committees. The assemblies made all decisions of policy and the committees executed them, imposing fines if necessary. Any action of the committees, however, could be challenged and revoked at weekly assemblies. During periods of upheaval, the sindicato as a whole became a “dual power” in the full sense of the word, often completely undercutting the authority of the official municipality.

Although recent evidence suggests that the braceros were already organized in quasi-syndicalist unions as early as the 1880s and were hardly the amorphous mass described by Brenan and Hobsbawm, the richly articulated forms described above did not fully emerge until the Second Republic. In 1918 the CNT was still a new organization in the south and the sindicato unico, although initiated by Andalusia, had yet to develop stable roots. In any case, time was working against the rebellion in the countryside. For years the ruling classes of the south had answered the demands of their laborers with an arrogant indifference, safe in the knowledge that they wielded complete power over their domains. With the upsurge of 1918, they panicked completely. The early concessions to the rural strikes were made as a result of fear, not in a spirit of compromise. Many landowners responded to the demands of their laborers by packing off to the provincial cities, in some cases leaving Spain altogether. Those who remained behind—the more determined proprietors, the caciques and their ruffians, the conservative middle classes—mobilized into armed groups. Every cortijo became an armory bristling with weapons.

Finally, in May 1919, the new Maura ministry sent General La Berrera into the south with a division of troops. The soldiers, divided into small detachments, occupied vitually all the restive towns and villages. With the declaration of martial law that accompanied this invasion, workers’ centers were closed down, radical newspapers suppressed, and thousands arrested. Those who were not confined fo jail were simply expelled from the region. The rural movement now began to roll back. The ebbing of the tide was hastened by demoralizing quarrels between the Socialists and Anarchists and by bitter infighting between the Anarchists and syndicalists in the local federations of the CNT.[23] Finally, where all repressive measures had failed, the strikes were literally starved out by the deepening economic crisis that followed the war. A quiet once more descended upon the south, not to be broken until the 1930s.

In the north, repression had started even earlier, under the Liberal premier Romanones, but its effects were to backfire completely on the government. During the summer of 1918, the CNT launched a massive propaganda campaign throughout most of Spain to win over the working class. Within six months, the labor organization had increased its Catalan membership nearly fivefold, leaping from 75,000 in June to 350,000 by the end of the year. CNT speakers crisscrossed the country addressing large meetings and winning adherents by the thousands. In some cases, the gains were utterly spectacular: in December, for example, while stopping at Valencia, Buenacasa and his comrades won over to the CNT the entire Federation National de Agricultores, which was then holding its fifth national congress. In addition, the CNT gained the adherence of the Regional Workers’ Federation of Andalusia, bringing two of the largest rural unions into its fold.

As the agitation continued to mount, the government became increasingly alarmed. Finally, on January 16, 1919, Romanones decreed the suspension of all constitutional guarantees in Catalonia. Nearly all the top CNT officials, including Buenacasa, Segui, Herreros, and Negre, were rounded up and imprisoned in the battleship “Pelayo” lying at anchor in Barcelona. Pestana managed to escape arrest, but Solidaridad Obrera, on which he served as editor, was suppressed.

These arrests produced an uproar in Catalonia. Although the labor organization had been driven underground, it continued to grow. In fact, it was at this point in the CNT’s fortunes—when it was technically an illegal organization, its top officials in jail and its newspaper suppressed—that Barcelona was rocked by one of the most memorable general strikes in the history of the Spanish labor movement.

The strike began with a minor dispute in the “Canadiense,” the popular name for an Anglo-Canadian hydroelectric company (Reigo y Fuerza del Ebro) that furnished Barcelona with power and light. Here the CNT had organized one of its strongest sindicatos unicos. However, it was not with the well-organized utility workers that the strike of the “Canadiense” began, but with the office employes. Toward the end of January, a number of clerks had received wage-cuts, and they turned to the sindicato for assistance. The union made an attempt to negotiate the dispute, but the English director of the firm, Peter Lawton, though at first disposed to deal with the workers, finally responded by discharging eight of them. Three days later, on February 5, the entire clerical staff declared a sit-in strike and sent a committee to the highest public officials of Catalonia requesting their intervention in the conflict. They were answered by the arrival of the police, precipitating a strike by the majority of the workers in the plant.

The intransigence of the “Canadiense” director requires an explanation. At this time in Barcelona, a policy conflict existed between the civil and military authorities. Reflecting the state of mind in Madrid, the civil governor Gonzalez Rothwos was inclined to deal amicably with the moderate officials in the CNT. He sensed that a policy of brute repression strengthened the Anarchist militants in the union, undercutting the position of Segui. On the other hand, the captain general Milans del Bosch was a harsh reactionary of the old school who had only one answer to labor unrest: dar la batalla—“to give battle.” In this stance he was completely supported by the newly organized Employers’ Federation, which sought to establish an antilabor, militaristic regime in open defiance of the civil authorities in Barcelona and Madrid. As Brenan notes, the paradoxical union of the “nationalistic” Catalan manufacturers with the anti-Catalan army had turned Milans del Bosch into “a sort of Viceroy,” clearly demonstrating that “for the Lliga, the social question took precedence over the Catalan one.” Apparently, it was the captain general and the Employers’ Federation which stiffened Lawton’s attitude in the dispute with the sindicato.

Before Milans del Bosch could “do battle,” however, the strike began to spread—and to the most strategic sectors of the economy. On the same day that the “Canadiense” went on strike (February 8), the workers of the Energia Electrica de Cataluna followed them in an act of solidarity, sitting-in in their own plant. Nine days later, on February 17, the textile workers walked out. They were followed by a nearly complete strike by all the electrical workers of Barcelona. The city was plunged iijto darkness. The government, faced with a desperate crisis in Spain’s leading industrial region, brought in the army to restore electrical service, but it could do so only partially, and 70 percent of the factories in the area were paralyzed.

The conflict between civil and military authorities now came into the open. While Gonzalez Rothwos was trying to restore negotiations, Milans del Bosch placed the entire province of Barcelona under martial law. For its part, the “Canadiense” issued a proclamation warning that any worker who failed to return to his job by March 6 could consider himself fired. At this point, an extraordinary thing occurred: the Sindicato Unico de Artes Graficas informed the Barcelona newspaper publishers that they would refuse to print anything that was prejudicial to the interests of the strikers. When Romanones in Madrid tried to break the strike by calling up the workers for military service, the printers kept the proclamation but of the newspapers. At length, this document found its way into print, only to be answered by a strike of all the railway and trolley workers. The majority of the mobilized strikers refused to answer the call-up, and those who reluctantly did so refused to act as strikebreakers. Some 3,000 of them were packed off to the Montjuich Fortress. By March 13, the frantic Romanones, pursuing a policy of negotiation with the strikers, installed Carlos Montanes as civil governor and Gerardo Doval as Barcelona police chief—both well-known for their liberal views. By now, the “Canadiense” equipment was suffering from major deterioration; the company, in fact, was facing bankruptcy.

A settlement was finally negotiated by Jose Morote, an official in the Catalan government. Although the strikers had been motivated largely by solidarity for their fellow unionists, most of them asked for wage increases, an eight-hour day, recognition of the sindicatos by management, and the reinstatement of discharged personnel. All of these demands were granted. In addition, the workers compelled the employers to reimburse them for the earnings they had lost while striking. As for the government, it was required to release all those imprisoned for “social questions,” including the CNT officials who had been arrested in January. There remained one qualification: the authorities refused to release anyone who was currently on trial.

On the night of March 16, the settlement was submitted for approval to a huge mass meeting of strikers at Barcelona’s plaza de toros de Las Arenas. The workers agreed to everything except the qualification on the “social prisoners.” A cry went up over the entire plaza: “Free everybody!” Indeed, feeling ran so high that the settlement was nearly rejected; but Segui, by arguing that nothing short of an insurrection could free those prisoners, gained the provisional approval of the audience. It was agreed to return to work for now, but to resume the strike if the government failed to release all the prisoners in seventy-two hours.

This general strike had lasted forty-four days, paralyzing virtually the entire economy of Barcelona and the towns in the surrounding area. The strikers had resisted a military call-up, thus risking imprisonment for four years. Not only workers in industry and transportation but shop clerks and dvil servants had walked off their jobs. Thousands had been packed off to the Montjuich Fortress. Finally, on March 11, Romanones had tried to curry favor with the strikers by decreeing an eight-hour day for the construction workers, which was to be extended to all trades on April 3. The decree made Spain the first country in the world to enact the eight-hour day into law.

The workers knew that they had won an historic victory—but so did the employers. Now the hand of Milans del Bosch began to be felt, and it tightened into a fist. Despite pleas by union officials, the government let the seventy-two hours pass without releasing the remaining prisoners. There was no way to avoid this challenge, and on March 24, wisely or not, the strike was resumed in full force.[24] This time the captain general acted with energy and decisiveness. Troops were stationed at all strategic points in the city with machine guns and artillery. To reinforce the soldiers, Milans del Bosch called up 8,000 men of the archaic Civic Guard, a volunteer militia recruited overwhelmingly from the bourgeois classes. Stores were forced open with rifle butts, even though the clerks were still on strike. Members of the Civic Guard transported supplies into the city, and armed troops patrolled the streets.

The government flatly refused to make any compromises with the strikers. To the contrary: the police launched a massive roundup of all the CNT officials, strike committees, and union militants they could find. By March 28, the strike had begun to follow a noticeable downward trend. First the store clerks and office workers returned to their jobs, followed by workers in light industry, transportation, and utilities. The metallurgical workers held out to the last, but by April 7 the general strike had essentially come to an end. A key factor in bringing about the resumption of work in an enterprise was the arrest of the strike committee and the demoralization that ensued. Although workers remained out well into April (partly because of lockouts) and the conflict lingered on in outlying industrial communities, the backbone of the strike had been decisively broken. Milans del Bosch, acting for the army and the arrogant Employers’ Federation, capped his victory with an act of defiance that virtually shaded into a pronunciamiento: he removed Montanes and Doval from office, packing off the civil governor to Madrid. This action toppled the Liberal government, and Romanones was replaced by Maura.

Milans del Bosch, whatever may have been his expectations, did not smash the CNT. The union was evidently a formidable power in Catalonia, and in the following year its strikes were to increase in number. The captain general, however, succeeded in realizing all the fears of his former civil governor, Gonzalez Rothwos: the violent tactics advocated by Anarchist militants were to replace the moderate methods of the syndicalists. Pistoleros, or gunmen, would soon begin to operate more frequently on behalf of both the union and the employers.

The last serious attempt to resolve the bitter conflict in Barcelona was made in the latter half of 1919, when Maura, repudiated by the electorate, was replaced by Sanchez de Toca. The new ministry, composed entirely of Conservatives, made a last ditch effort to reconcile the two classes. That the ministry was formed at all is almost miraculous; the king had begun to meddle in parliamentary affairs in a manner that verged on the erratic. The military juntas, now extremely reactionary, supported the employers in their policy of dar la batalla. Despite these formidable obstacles, Sanchez de Toca made an unusual effort to arrive at a modus vivendi with the labor movement. His cool and conciliatory behavior in the great strikes that swept Malaga, Valencia, and Saragossa in 1919 stand out in sharp contrast to the mindless repression initiated by Maura and his aide La Cierva.

Barcelona was dealt with cautiously. The new civil governor, Julio Amado, tried to create a stable system of labor arbitration by establishing a Mixed Commission of Labor (Comision Mixta de Trabajo), on which sat an equal number of employer and union representatives.[25] For a while, it almost seemed that Amado’s policy of conciliation might succeed: the number of atentados fell off sharply, and an agreement was reached in September for the return of 70,000 workers (many of them lockouts as well as strikers) to their jobs.

But this period of conciliation was to be very shortlived. In October 1919, a congress of the Employers’ Federations in Barcelona secretly voted to initiate a general lockout in Catalonia and, if necessary, throughout Spain, in the event that the government should fail to end the “present situation of social disorganization.” The decision was followed by a month of maneuvering between the union and the manufacturers, in which the latter tried to create the very “social disorganization” they had been complaining about.[26] When, on November 25, some 25,000 construction workers went on strike, the employers apparently decided that-the opportune moment for their offensive had arrived. The lockout began on the very same day, throwing 200,000 out of work. The action lasted well into January of the following year—a period of ten bitter weeks, during which virtually all industry in Barcelona was brought to a standstill.

It was in the midst of the lockout—indeed, during one of its worst phases—-.that the CNT decided to hold its second national congress. Since Barcelona was no longer safe for such a gathering, it was to take place in the Socialist stronghold of Madrid.[27] On the morning of December 10,1919,437 delegates gathered in the aristocratic Teatro de la Comedia, filling most of the orchestra seats and boxes. The remaining sections of the Teatro were occupied by a large assortment of artists, writers, poets, and academicians; in short, that unique peripheral group of intellectuals that had collected around the Madrid Anarchist organizations from the days of the First Republic. It was truly a people’s congress, with each delegation wearing its own regional garb: the Basques in their berets, the Andalusians in their large Cordobese hats and peasant blouses, and so forth. The delegates represented over 700,000 members. The overwhelming majority— 427,000—were located in Catalonia, while the Levant claimed 132,000. The Andalusian delegation—“the most anarchist delegation,” according to Buenacasa—-represented less than 90,000, a reflection of the harsh repression Maura had inflicted on the region.

Although somewhat formally structured, with a credentials committee and special committees to report on important issues, the congress was highly democratic. From the outset it was decided to grant everyone present the right to speak, although many individuals in the Teatro were not members of the CNT. Voting privileges, of course, were reserved for the authorized delegates. From beginning to end, it was a stormy congress. For eight years, repression had prevented a representative, national assembly of this kind from convening. Passions and ideas were pent up in all of the delegates. No sooner had the lean figure of Boal called, the crowded meeting to order than scores of delegates sprang to their feet, demanding the floor. Later, an extremely able chairman, Jose Maria Martinez of the Asturian delegation, managed in an affable but decisive manner to keep the proceedings orderly, but “vivas” to Anarchism and to the CNT exploded throughout the sessions.

The congress unequivocally declared its belief in comunismo anarquico. It adopted the Sindicato Unico de Ramos e Industrias (single union of branches and industries) for large cities and the more encompassing Sindicatos Unicos de Trabajadores (single union of workers) for the smaller towns and villages. This merely acknowledged the fact that craft sections within the sindicato unico were not feasible for unions in small or rural communities.

With the adoption of the sindicato unico, the congress annulled the Federaciones de oficio (the federations organized by trade and industry), replacing them by simple Comites de relation profesional (committees of professional relations). No longer was the labor organization to have the dual aspects advocated by traditional syndicalism: there were to be sindicatos unicos, grouped into local or territorial federations. Craft problems were to be handled by the trade sections within each sindicato unico and, on a larger scale, by simple, loosely organized committees of professional relations. “The National Confederation will be composed basically of its Regional Federations,” declares the resolution adopted on this issue, “these by the Local and Comarcal Federations and these by the Sindicatos.” With this structural change, the CNT was now essentially decentralized and its internal relations made entirely organic. Although a National Commitee continued to exist, the autonomy of the local and regional federations was no longer abridged by the existence of parallel, separately organized craft bodies.

The congress called upon the printers’ sindicatos to refuse to publish any periodicals in localities where authorities had suspended the CNT press. Furthermore, the printers were asked to exercise a “red” censorship in direct proportion to the censorship imposed on labor periodicals. The delegates affirmed their commitment to accion directa and declared their support for the “intelligent,” “opportune” use of sabotage. They condemned any participation by the CNT unions in the Mixed Commissions. By this time, the Catalan Regional Confederation had acknowledged its error in joining the Mixed Commissions organized under the Sanchez ministry, an act of self-criticism that the delegates accepted without reproaches.

The biggest problem facing the congress was its attitude toward other movements, notably the UGT and the Communist International. A strong sentiment for fusion with the Socialist union existed among delegates from Asturias and Castile, the two areas where the UGT had deep roots in the working class. The Saragossa delegate supported fusion, reminding the congress that workers from his area were not yet aligned with either labor organization. On the other hand, the Andalusians as a bloc and Anarchist militants from other regions opposed it furiously. The ill-feeling of many cenetistas toward the Socialist union can best be conveyed by referrring directly to one of the resolutions condeming fusion. The ugetistas (UGT members) were described as amarillos y al margen del movimietito obrero “yellows and on the margin of the labor movement.” Nourishing this sharp language were bitter memories of strikes in which ugetista workers had scabbed against their brothers in the CNT and the cynical advantage the Socialist leadership had taken of Anarchist defeats. Yet the use of these words produced a sensation at the congress, and for three days the delegates heatedly debated the issue. When it finally came to a vote, the fusionists were defeated by 324,000 to 170,000. The number of abstentions was fairly large and, unaccountably, delegates representing some 200,000 members did not participate in the voting at all.

By contrast, the Bolshevik Revolution was greeted with unrestrained enthusiasm. The congress called upon all Spanish armament workers not to produce any weapons destined for use against the Red Army and threatened to call a general strike if Spain sent troops to Russia. After avowing their support of Bakunin’s principles in the First International, the delegates voted for provisional adherence to th^Communist International.

“In spite of the fact that not one of the four hundred anarchist delegates of the Spanish organization in Madrid was disposed to cede a single point of our ideological convictions,” observes’Buenacasa, “the truth is that the immense majority behaved like perfect Bolsheviks. This was in spite of the great love we felt toward the libertarian ideal. It had an explanation: the Russian Revolution impressed us to the extreme that we saw in it the revolution we dreamed of.” The Asturian delegate, Quintanilla, warned against this naivete: “The Russian Revolution does not embrace our ideals; it is a socialist type of revolution, common to all the revolutionary socialist tendencies started in Europe. Its direction and organization does not correspond to our concept of workers’ intervention, but to that of political parties.” While calling upon the delegates to oppose European intervention in the Russian Civil War, the Asturian urged them not to join the Communist International.

The relationship of the CNT to the Russian Bolsheviks was to follow a strange trajectory. In June 1920, Angel Pestana was sent to Moscow to represent the labor organization at the Second Congress of the Communist International. In Moscow he was courted by Zinoviev and Losovsky, but he soon began to sense the enormous gap that existed between the libertarian ideals of his movement and the authoritarian practices of the Bolsheviks. The Russians tried to be accommodating; to lure Anarchosyndicalist unions into the Communist fold, they established the International of Red Trade Unions (“Profintern”), presumably an independent body that accepted all revolutionary unions irrespective of their political views.

These flirtations did not last long. In March 1921, the Soviet regime harshly suppressed the Kronstadt sailors uprising. The Kronstadt issue, coupled with a mounting campaign against Russian Anarchists, began to alienate the libertarian movement throughout the world. The relations between the CNT and Moscow became increasingly taut. Pestana, returning to Spain, reported on his bleak experiences. His account was corroborated by Gaston Leval, who had gone to Russia separately as a representative of the Catalan Anarchists. On June 11, 1922, a conference of the CNT at Saragossa rejected affiliation with the Bolshevik movement, and the CNT together with other independent syndicalist unions in Europe, began to explore the possibility of forming a new international. Bearing the traditional name of “International Workingmen’s Association,” the syndicalist international was founded at a congress held in Berlin from Decemeber 26, 1922, to January 3, 1923. The adherence of the CNT to the new body finally ruptured all ties between the Spanish labor organization and Moscow.

The Bolsheviks, however, did not suffer a complete loss in Spain. In April 1921, a group headed by Andres Nin and Joaquin Maurin surfaced in Moscow, professing to represent the CNT. Actually, Nin and Maurin represented virtually no one but the Lleida local federation (their stronghold), which they had persuaded to send them to Russia.[28] Both men were deeply enamored of the Bolsheviks and, without consulting the movement they professed to represent, proceeded to affiliate it to the Communist International. Their actions and claims were disavowed by a plenum of the CNT at Logrono the following August. After a futile attempt to return to Spain, Nin went back to Moscow to become head of the. “Profintern.” Maurin managed to reach Spain and together with Anarchosyndicalist and Socialist dissidents, established a Communist-syndicalist group of his own, largely independent of the newly founded Spanish Communist Party. In later years, both he and Nin were to combine and establish the semi-Trotskyist Partido Obrera de Unification Marxista (Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification): the ill-fated POUM.

The Madrid congress of the CNT in December 1919 marks the high point in the postwar development of Spanish Anarchosyndicalism. The movement had taken on a more national character, expanding beyond the confines of Catalonia and Andalusia. It had become a serious competitor of the UGT in the mining districts of Oviedo and had established roots in the steel plants of Gijon and La Felguera. Saragossa was a center of “pure” Anarchism—a “Jerez of the north”—with tendrils extending into the estates of the steppe country and the vineyards of Rioja. A strong Anarchosyndicalist movement existed in La Coruna, particularly among the dock workers, as well as in the surrounding rural districts. In most Spanish ports the majority of sailors and stevedores favored the CNT. The union had wide support among the mountain peasants of the Levant and strong sindicatos in the Rio Tinto mining district.

Anarchist groups, as distinguished from Anarchosyndicalist unions, were forming into regional federations after having existed for years in relative isolation from each other. An Andalusian Anarchist Federation had been established in 1917, and now there was one in Catalonia as well as other provinces. These finally collected into a loosely organized National Federation of Anarchist Groups, later establishing an exile offshoot in France called the Federation of Anarchist Groups of the Spanish Language. In the late 1920s, the two federations were to form the basis of the Federation Anarquista Iberica, the redoubtable FAI of the Republican years and the Civil War.

In Catalonia, however, the CNT had entered a period of deep crisis. The lockout was to completely exhaust the labor organization and the pistolero war was to claim a disastrous toll in dead and wounded among its most capable militants. Indeed, this savage duel l^tween armed Anarchists and employer-hired thugs was to cost many lives not only among the unionists but also among public officials, manufacturers, and the highest echelons of the state.

No less important than the claim it made in humanlife was the atmsophere of illegality it generated. After the street war, the country would never again be the same. Everyone, from Cortes deputies to Anarchist militants, pocketed revolvers, and almost every large organization had some kind of paramilitary force at its disposal. On an ever-increasing scale, political disputes involved a recourse to arms. The return of the “permanent guerrilla” to Spanish society is vitally important in understanding the social atmosphere that produced the Civil War.

The Pistoleros

In 1916 Angel Pestana, who at that time was editor of Solidaridad Obrera, was privately approached by two young workers who, without any preliminaries, declared:

We are going to pose a question to you. We belong to an Anarchist action group and are disposed to continue the work already started. We come to propose that you be our spokesman in the confederal committees, especially in the Regional Committee. Our proposal is as follows: we are willing to make an alentado against any employer or factory director the organization considers it advisable to eliminate. In exchange for this sacrifice, which we are willing to make for the organization, we only ask that you pay us the expenses which we incur and the wages of the days lost from work. Furthermore, that there be a reserve fund of two or three thousand pesetas so that in case of the necessity for flight, if our identity is discovered, we can put our hands on it immediately. And if anyone is imprisoned, as you can understand, we want you to help us. What we ask of you, as you will see, is very little; what we offer, on the other hand, is a great deal.

Pestana, who knew the young men, tried to dissuade them. They were wasting their time, he warned, for he was unalterably opposed to such methods. Later he learned that they had made the same offer to the organization through one of its committees and that it had been accepted. These young Anarchists, Pestana goes on to say, did not decide which of the employers and their factory directors were to be assassinated. The decision was made by the men who accepted their services. The atentados were entirely impersonal and were performed without expectation of financial reward or desire for personal vengeance. At that time, according to Pestana, two or three Anarchist action groups were operating in Barcelona. “Let us state that those who took advantage of this and paid the young men for their work” he adds, “were some elements, very few, among the leaders of the textile unions. When this was done, the first step had been taken.”

If this was the “first step,” however, it was not a major one. Sastre y Sama’s study of atentados performed against Barcelona employers shows that they were not greater in number between 1916 and 1919 than they had been in 1914.[29] It was not until late 1919 that the number of Anarchist atentados began to rise significantly, paralleled by increasing assassinations of CNT militants and officials. The year was a particularly bitter one for the labor federation. It was the year of the February-March general strike, Maura’s campaign of persecution, and the long lockout from November until January of the following year. Except for a brief truce initiated by the Sanchez ministry, the government had been especially provocative: constitutional guarantees in Catalonia were suspended between late January and mid-March, and again in late March, by which time some 40,000 workers had seen the inside of jails. The sindicatos had been attacked repeatedly, their records seized and the centros obreros closed down. Finally, to cap these provocations, one of the most outstanding CNT officials was cut down by the bullets of assassins. On the night of July 19, two men in police uniforms drove up to the home of Pablo Sabater, the president of the textile union, and shot him to death. Perhaps more than any other event up to that point, the murder of a reveled union militant increased pistolerismo in the Catalan seaport to uncontrollable proportions.

The disease was endemic in Barcelona. Even in the prewar years agents provocateurs, either hired or encouraged by the police and civil governors, planted bombs in Barcelona to provide an excuse for crackdowns on the union movement. A network of informers extended through the city, parasitizing the labor movement like lice. In unruly periods, of course, they had their work cut out for them; in lean periods, these elements learned to create their own “incidents” and generate a demand for their services. One of the most notorious examples in its day was the Rull family—Juan Rull, his brothers, and his mother—who for years had set off bombs in Barcelona and collected fees from the police for spurious information on the “perpetrators” of these “Anarchist outrages.” As an informer, Juan Rull had access to the ears of three civil governors; indeed, there is compelling evidence that he was in the pay of high clerical politicians like Eusebio Guell. Rull’s arrest in July 1907 produced a scandal that lingered beyond his execution in August, a year later. On that day, a bomb went off on a main boulevard of Barcelona. Nearby, a note was found declaring that Rull was innocent and that the bombings would continue despite his death—which, to many, meant that it was not one rtlftn or his family but an entire syndrome that lay at the root of Barcelona ‘saten tados.

The outbreak of the First World War found neutral Spain—and particularly Barcelona—infested by adventurers, criminals, and mercenaries. At first living on opportunities for espionage, these elements soon began to thrive on the frayed nerves of the Catalan bourgeoisie and on the Barcelona police department’s growing demand for hired assassins. Perhaps the most sensational example of these sinister connections was revealed in the pages of Solidaridad Obrera on June 8, 1918, when Pestana published evidence that a district police chief, Manuel Bravo Portillo, was operating a German espionage ring in the port area. Although Pestana’s charges were to cost Bravo his job, the captain general, Milans del Bosch, recruited his services in the early street war with the CNT.

During his years in the police department, Bravo had served in the volatile Atarazanas quarter of the city, where the brutality of his methods had made him a particular object of detestation among the Barcelona workers. With the outbreak of the February-March general strike the ex-police officer and his cronies, in close association with a self-styled “Baron Koenig,” were given a monthly stipend of about $6,000 to perform special services for the employers. Their jobs included atentados against CNT officials and union activists. There seems to be little doubt that men from Bravo’s gang murdered Sabater. Bravo, in turn, did not survive the summer. On September 15, at noon, he was shot down fn the Calle de Santa Tecla. Two days afterwards, one of his most detested agents, Eduardo Ferrer, a former leader in the metallurgical union, was killed. News of Bravo’s assassination produced a carnival atmosphere in Barcelona. Buenacasa tells us that “thousands of workers celebrated the event with banquets, singing, and speeches on the subject.”

The gang, however, did not disappear. It was taken over by the “Baron,” a foreign adventurer who lacked even the residual social and national loyalties Bravo had possessed. “Koenig” (his real name may have been Coleman) was simply out for what he could get. He extorted “protection” money from the individual employers; those who refused to pay became victims of “Anarchist outrages,” whether they had particularly outraged the Anarchists or not. The situation began to get out of hand when the “Baron” became involved in disputes within the Employers’ Federation itself. Accordingly, in the late spring of 1920, he was quietly expelled from Spain and his gang dissolved.

The work of the Bravo-Koenig gang had already been taken up on a broader scale before the “Baron” disappeared. In December 1919, the Carlist Ramon Sales founded the sindicato libre (free union) at the Ateneo, Legitimista in Barcelona. Patronized by the church and employers, the new body—whatever the sincerity of many of its founders and followers, who may have been “pure-and-simple” trade unionists—was used to divide the labor movement. Recruiting its membership from the more religious, more conservative, or simply more opportunistic strata of the working class, it made very little headway against the CNT. But it provided a new reservoir oipistoleros and an ideological covering for professional gunmen in the union’s cadres. Superficially, the battle in Barcelona now took on the appearance of an inter-union rivalry waged with revolvers in hand.

To worsen a rapidly deteriorating situation, in November 1920 the captain general of Catalonia, Severino Martinez Anido, was appointed civil governor, replacing Carlos Bas. This appointment, as Brenan notes,

was an act of defiance to all moderate and humane opinion in the country. His disagreement with Bas was due to the fact that he had supported extra-legal means for dealing with terrorism: he is said to have shown Bas a list of 675 syndicalists whom, he declared, ought to be shot outright. Unamuno describes him as follows: “The man is a pure brute—he can’t even talk, he can only roar and bray, though his roars and brays always mean something.”

The Anarchists, in turn, attempted to regroup their own forces. There can be little doubt that increasingly violent elements began to influence the direction of the CNT, although professional gunmen were rarely to be found in an organization whose resources were slim and whose members were bitterly persecuted.[30] The remarks of Buenacasa on this state of affairs convey the disgust that the more staid Anarchists felt over their inability to arrest the trend toward atentados. Buenacasa complains that few of the atentados were revolutionary acts. “The unions,” he concludes, “were unable to shake off these pistoleros who were acting on their own and who in a few cases were able to seize the leadership of important committees of the organization.”

Yet by this time, the Anarchists may very well have had no choice: with Martinez Anido at the helm, any failure to resist might have been more demoralizing than the rampant gunplay. To all appearances the new civil governor and the Employers’ Federation were waging a war of extermination against the CNT. A distinguished conservative politician, Burgos y Mazo, leaves no doubt that the blame for the crisis in Barcelona belonged to the ruling classes. “It must be said in all clarity,” he emphasizes, “without fear, and in due tribute to truth: the employer class and other leading elements in Barcelona were the principle culprits of this horrible social state today.”

An incredible situation now began to unfold in Barcelona: the atentados of the employers’ pistoleros were matched, almost victim for victim, by the atentados of the Anarchists. Nothing quite like this macabre bookkeeping had occurred before. Following an attempt on Segui’s life on January 4, 1920, the Anarchists responded with atentados against the president of the Employers’ Federation, one of its directors, and two police agents. Atentados now began to occur almost regularly, alternating between the two sides like the movement of a pendulum. By the autumn of 1920, there was one nearly every day. One of the most senseless atrocities occurred on the night of September 12, when a bomb exploded in a working-class dance hall on the Paralelo, killing three and wounding twenty. A month later, the head of a metallurgical firm, E. Tarrida, was assassinated. This was followed two weeks later by the death of Jaime Pujal, president of the Association of Electrical Employers.

The arrest of sixty-four CNT officials on November 20 led to a general protest strike. On November 23, Martinez Anido responded by outlawing the labor federation and reestablishing censorship. Three days later, the president of the sindicato libre of Reus was killed. His death was followed the very next day by the assassination of Jose Canela, an important member of the Regional Committee of the CNT. The authorities and pistoleros did not spare even the attorneys of the labor federation: the lawyer Luis Companys was arrested and shortly afterwards his colleague, the popular Republican deputy Francisco Layret, was murdered.

The pistol war claimed victims not only from the Employers’ Federation, the unions, and the police, but from the highest summits of the government. In 1920, the civil governor of Catalonia, the Conde de Salvatierra, who had presided over the lockout of late 1919 and early 1920, fell before the guns of Anarchist pistoleros. On March 8, 1921, the Conservative premier, Eduardo Dato, was killed by three Catalan Anarchists in reprisal for restoring the Ley de fugas (Law of Flight), a disgusting practice in which the police killed arrested syndicalists, claiming they were shot while “trying to escape.” For its part, the CNT paid a corresponding price with the death of Evelio Baal, the general secretary of the National Committee, killed at dawn on June 15, minutes after having been released by the police. His companion, Antonio Feliu, another National Committee member, managed to escape this attempt, but was shot down two weeks later.

Between 1918 and 1923, this systematic slaughter claimed about nine hundred lives in Barcelona alone and about 1,500 throughout Spain. A premier, two former civil governors, an Archbishop, nearly 300 employers, factory directors, foremen, and police, and many workers and their leaders in the sindicato libre, fell before the bullets and bombs of Anarchist action groups. The CNT, in turn, lost many outstanding members of its national, regional, and local committees. In the end, the labor organization paid a heavier price than its opponents. “Assassinations in the public streets,” writes Buenacasa, “followed the authoritarian persecution of the state; the very best of our cadre was threatened with this dilemma: die, kill, flee or fall in prison. The violent ones defended and killed; the stoic died and also the brave ... the cowards or prudent fled or hid; the most active wound up in prison.”

A failure of nerve was already evident in the late summerof 1920, when the CNT leadership began one of those curious flirtations with the bureacracy of the UGT from which the Anarchosyndicalist union invariably emerged with bitter misgivings. Pressured to the point of near-panic by the employer offensive in Barcelona, the moderates of’ the National Committee and Catalan Regional Committee decided to solicit the UGT for a common defense pact.

In itself, such a pact would have been a meaningless achievement for the CNT unless it opened the way to a joint general strike. The UGT had no resources in Catalonia and was faced with very little prospect of repression in its own strongholds, despite the increasingly reactionary policies of the Dato ministry in Madrid. Indeed the Socialists had everything to gain by a pact with the CNT: the Russian Revolution had deeply divided their party. A large percentage of the Socialist membership had veered to the left, committing the party to adherence to the Communist International. The reformists in the party and the UGT needed all the revolutionary camouflage they could acquire, and nothing seemed better, at this point, than the prestige of a pact with the militant Anarchosyndicalist union.

Having received a favorable nod from the Madrid Socialists, Segui, Boal, and Quemades hastened to the Spanish capital and conferred with Largo Caballero, Cordero, Fernandez, de los Toyos, and Martinez Gil. On September 3, 1920, these moderates signed a pact which advanced a demand for the restoration of constitutional guarantees. The defensivness of the wording is astonishing: “We, the declared enemies of bourgeois society constitute ourselves as the defenders of its laws.” From this coterie, the Spanish bourgeoisie had little to fear, and it is testimony to the stupidity of the ruling classes that they made little effort to coopt the ready and waiting reformist leaders in both labor organizations. Rather, the Conservative government of Eduardo Dato hardened its attitude and prepared to do battle, if any was really necessary.

The pact produced an angry uproar in the CNT Regional Committees outside of Catalonia, all the more because the National Committee and the Catalan leadership had consulted with no one in undertaking it. Under pressure from the regions, a plenum was held in October, where the agreement was roundly attacked. It was decided to withhold public criticism of the pact owing to a strike of the Rio Tinto miners, where CNT-UGT collaboration was desperately needed.

But the strike was to gain absolutely nothing from the pact. The conflict in the Rio Tinto, a rich copper district in Andalusia, was one of the most bitter, and certainly one of the most poignant disputes in the history of the Spanish labor movement. The mines were owned by British interests. They had been acquired for a preposterously low sum decades earlier, when the national wealth of Spain had been placed on the open market for foreign exploitation. The strike, which began in June 1920, was led by the CNT. Although strong UGT unions existed in the area, the Anarchosyndicalists and Socialists regarded each other with deep suspicion. But this infighting was overshadowed by the desperate lengths to which the miners had gone to win their struggle; at the time of the pact, the majority of them had sold all their personal possessions and gone to live in the towns rather than yield to the employers. There was talk among the strikers of seizing the mines and the offices of the mine owners. The dramatic features of this struggle aroused the working class throughout Spain. Andalusia was on the brink of a general strike in sympathy with the miners, a move that would have gained wide support in the north had the two labpr organizations been prepared for militant action.

But this movement came to nothing. A delegation of CNT and UGT leaders went to the Rio Tinto to examine the problem at first hand. On their return, the UGT leaders could suggest little more than an assessment of one peseta per week on the membership of the two organizations in support of the miners. An earlier CNT proposal for a joint general strike, to be initiated by UGT miners and railway workers, had been rejected by the Madrid Socialists. The problem was resolved for the moderates in both unions when the miners, after striking for four months, returned to work in defeat.

By now the pact was in shreds. It was to be eliminated completely when a general strike broke out in Barcelona over the arrests of the CNT leaders and the assassination of Layret. Once again the CNT called upon the UGT for support. Not only was aid refused but it was denied with an arrogance that clearly indicated the Socialists had lost all interest in future collaboration with the CNT. The responsibility for making this evident was left to Largo Caballero, who, when he asked why the UGT workers in the Basque province of Vizcaya had not been called out to aid the Catalans, answered: “Because we are not obliged to do so.” As Buenacasa tells the story, the Anarchosyndicalists of Bilbao, the great Basque industrial city, on leaving Largo Caballero, “told him energetically: ‘In spite of this there will be a strike in Vizcaya.’ But Largo Caballero, top representative of the UGT, sent dispatches to Bilbao telling his’ followers that if the anarchists and syndicalists try to paralyze the work in the factories, mines, etc., they should be beaten with cudgels.”

The strike in Catalonia collapsed and, with it, any prospect of collaboration between the two unions for years to come.

The CNT at this time was plagued not only by bitter harassment at the hands of the authorities but also by the divisive activities of the Communists, who were determined either to control the labor organization or to split it. In Catalonia, Andalusia, and other regions, sharp infighting between Communists and Anarchists dissipated much of the union’s energies. The Communists were defeated not merely by the weight of Anarchist influence in the CNT, but by a general revival of the labor movement, which temporarily lifted the heavy atmosphere of defeat and isolation that nourished internecine fighting. In April 1922, constitutional guarantees were restored for the first time in nearly a year and a half. A walkout of the teamsters in Barcelona turned into a general strike of nearly all the transport workers of Catalonia. The CNT, reemerging from a harassed clandestinity, managed to hold a successful national conference on June 11 in Saragossa. The forty-two delegates who attended the conference broke all ties with the Communist International. Dominated largely by the moderates in the CNT, the conference expressed its support of Segui’s participation in the mixed commission and passed a resolution favoring salaries for union officials. To still further exacerbate the differences between the Anarchist and Syndicalist tendencies within the confederation, the conference approved a vaguely phrased “political” resolution, largely conciliatory in tone towards the Socialists and liberals, that implied the possibility of CNT electoral blocks with parties that favored the restoration and extension of civil liberties. As it turned out, this was to be the last major national gathering of the union in Spain until the declaration of the Second Republic. Already Primo de Rivera stood in the wings, and events were moving the scenery into place for a dictatorship that would last more than six years.

As if to symbolize the end of the postwar era, on March 10, 1923, Salvador Segui and a companion, Francisco Comas, were shot down in Barcelona’s Calle de la Cadena. The assassination occurred during the busiest part of the day, when the street was filled with people. Segui’s death, at the age of thirty-three, removed the most important and influential spokesman for “restraint” in the CNT. The syndicalists in the great labor organization, producing no worthy successor to Segui, were for some time relegated to a secondary role. But with the disarray produced in Anarchist groups by the dictatorship, they returned to the foreground.

Although Segui ranks high in the pantheon of Anarchosyndicalist martyrs, his contribution to the CNT is difficult to evaluate. He was born of working-class parents in industrial Lleida on December 23, 1890. The family moved to Barcelona while he was still a child, and here, in the streets of the proletarian quarters, he formed the earthy competence and aggressive temperament that were to rriake him one of the CNT’s most capable organizers. This “instinctivo” pf the streets, whose employment in a sugar refinery earned him the life-long nickname of “Noi del Sucre” (“Sugar-boy”), was also an admirer of Nietzschean individualism, of the superhombre to whom “all is permitted.” At an early age, Segui was sent off to work as a house painter and was drawn into the labor movement. He took an active part in the “Tragic Week” and became a refugee from the repression that followed. His life thereafter centered almost entirely around the movement—a sequence of meetings, propaganda tours, negotiations, conferences, and hard committee work in preparing strikes.

Although Segui was familiar with Anarchist and Socialist writings, he remained above all a practical organizer to whom comunismo libertario (he regarded himself as an Anarchosyndicalist) remained a distant ideal. Revolution, in his eyes, seemed primarily a matter of organization. A moderate who consistently favored collaboration, with the UGT, he became a target of bitter criticism by Anarchist militants, who detested his policies while admiring his administrative talents. In turn, he regarded them as “doctrinaires” whose lack of “realism” endangered the development of a mass, united labor movement. Accordingly, Segui always came to the fore whenever balm was needed to quiet the restive ranks of the CNT. He was one of the architects of the Pact of Saragossa; a proponent of the Mixed Commission (in which he participated with great earnestness); the ideal negotiator in agreements with employers and with UGT bureaucrats.

It was Segui who, almost single-handedly, persuaded the Barcelona workers to return to their jobs during the general strike of 1919, when the “Canadiense” was facing bankruptcy and the manufacturers were in full retreat. As it turned out, he was wrong in much of the advice he offered. Although words like “compromise,” “restraint,” and “moderation” evoke a certain reverence in many quarters, they never truly belonged to the vocabulary of the Spanish bourgeoisie. For his attempt to promote compromise and restrain violence, St’0ui was humiliated by the intransigence of the Catalan manufacturers—and probably murdered by their pistoleros.

Ironically, the men who were to avenge Segui’s assassination were the very human types he fought so vigorously in the CNT. On May 17, 1923, Anarchist pistoleros from Barcelona assassinated Fernando Gonzalez Regueral, the former governor of Vizcaya. Three weeks later, on June 11, they killed Cardinal Juan Soldevila y Romero, the Archbishop of Saragossa. Both men were notorious reactionaries who bitterly opposed the unions. They were killed by members of the “Solidarios,” a group of young Anarchists whose practices and outlook were antithetical in almost every respect to those of the man they avenged.

We must pause here to look closely at this Anarchist action group, for in many ways it typifies the grupo de afinidad that was later to exercise so much influence in the FAI. Many such small Anarchist groups had been in existence as far back as the 1890s. The “Solidarios,” and others like “El Crisol,” which acquired a certain fame, were formed late in 1920 or early in 1921, when the Syndicalist Youth was established for the purpose of dealing with the pistoleros of the sindicato libre. Ricardo Sanz, who belonged to the “Solidarios,” tells us that they were young people, the majority under twenty-five years of age, who had been drawn to Barcelona from different regions of Spain. These youths, “spontaneous in principle, felt themselves ever more tied morally to the group,” writes Sanz,

and there were many of them, those who might be called direct collaborators, who felt themselves by right, not only in fact as components of the group.

All the components of the group were workers and, therefore, lived on their daily wages. The group had no other income in any sense, but it also had no other expenditures; this was covered by arrangements according to the capabilities of each one of its members. Thine and mine hardly existed among the members of this group—in any case, not when it was a matter of activities related to the collective plan. Individually, each member of the group was free to do what he felt convenient, it being well understood that the activity was not in contradiction with the purity of the ideas.[31]

The “Solidarios” included a famous threesome—Buenaventura Durruti, his close friend Francisco Ascaso, and Juan Garcia Oliver— whose collaboration as “Los Tres Mosqueteros” was to acquire almost legendary proportions. In time, the group came to be known as much by Durruti’s name as by the one it originally adopted. According to Sanz, however, neither Durruti, Ascaso, nor Garcia Oliver were regarded as leaders. The “Solidarios” were a “group of individuals,” he emphasizes, among whom “no one was more or less important than any other.”

Accordingly, the “Solidarios” resembled a community rather than a cdhventional political organization. To fully understand the close personal relationships within this typical grupo de afinidad, we must try to compare it with the type of organization favored by the Socialists and Communists. A Marxian party consisted of a hierarchical cadre—a bureaucracy composed of paid officials—forming a distinct, clearly defined chain of command. The Communists, and to a lesser extent the Socialists, demanded obedience ffom those below. Authority was vested in a supreme executive body which made all decisions of policy and administration in the interims between party congresses.

The party’s complex cadre was fleshed out by a well-disciplined membership, each individual marching in step with the others in accordance with the decisions of the party congresses and leading committees. The preferred type of relationship within this political army verged on the impersonal. Although it would have been impossible for individuals in any group exposed to some degree of persecution not to feel a kinship for each other, Marxists tended to stress the value of morally and emotionally neutral ties within their organizations. Today’s comrade might well be tomorrow’s political foe or factional opponent. “Scientific socialism” demanded a certain detachment toward people and ideas, a severe rationalism that could prevail over passions, impulses, and personal intimacy. One owed one’s primary loyalties to the party, that is to say, to its apparatus, not to those who shared one’s struggles, risks, and responsibilities.

The Anarchists were genuinely horrified by this arrangement. They regarded it as passionless, soulless, even morally indecent. The revolution for them was, above all, a great moral transformation which was expected to liberate individuals, to restore their freedom and spontaneity of development. Individuals had to be remade, not merely as producers of goods but as new totalities, free to take full command of their destiny and daily life. Any lesser goal was not worth fighting for. Accordingly, the Anarchists regarded the Marxist party as another statist form, a hierarchy that, if it succeeded in “seizing power,” would preserve the power of one human being over another, the authority of the leader over the led. The Marxist party, in their eyes, was a mirror image of the very society it professed to oppose, an invasion of the camp of the revolution by bourgeois values, methods, and structures.

The Marxists argued that their organizational forms gave them greater efficiency and effectiveness, a claim the Anarchists emphatically denied. To the contrary, they insisted that the most efficient and effective organization was ultimately based on voluntarism, not on coercion or formal obedience. A movement that sought to promote a liberatory revolution had to develop liberatory and revolutionary forms. This meant, as we already have noted, that it had to mirror the free society it was trying to achieve, not the repressive one it was trying to overthrow. If a movement sought to achieve a world united by solidarity and mutual aid, it had to be guided by these precepts; if it sought a decentralized, stateless, nonauthoritarian society, it had to be structured in accordance with these goals. With voluntaristic aims in mind, the Anarchists tried to build an organic movement in which individuals were drawn to each other by a sense of “affinity,” by like interests and proclivities, not held together by bureaucratic tendons and ideological abstractions. And just as individual revolutionaries were drawn together into groups freely, by “affinity,” so too the individual groups federated by voluntary agreement, never impairing the exercise of initiative and independence of will.

It will be recalled that the Anarchists continually stressed the importance of education and the need to live by Anarchist precepts—the need, indeed, to create a countersociety that could provide the space for people to begin to remake themselves. Accordingly, they placed a great deal of emphasis on leisure and moral excellence. The Socialists were despised because their demands focused primarily on wage increases and material improvements. Far more important, in the Anarchists eyes, was the need to shorten working hours so that, as Anselmo Lorenzo argued, people “would have the liberty in which to think, to study ... to satisfy their moral instincts.” This type of language—words like “liberty” and “moral instincts”—was alien to the Socialist and Communist parties. In Saragossa, the Anarchists developed a proletarian following that was unique in the history of revolutionary movements. These Aragonese workers began to emphasize moral, political, humanistic struggles over economic ones. As E.H. Carr has observed, their strikes “were characterized by their scorn for economic demands and the toughness of their revolutionary solidarity: strikes for comrades in prison were more popular than strikes for better conditions.

The “Solidarios” were to stand out among other grupos de afinidad by virtue of the scope and boldness of their escapades. In other respects, however, they were typical of the Anarchist action groups operating in Spain at the time. There can be little doubt that they— and others like them—terrified many men in the government who were guilty of major crimes against the labor movement. On this score, the case of Martinez Anido is revealing. After ruling Barcelona for two years in a manner that had completely shocked public opinion throughout Spain, this brutal soldier was finally dismissed in 1922. One of the immediate causes of his departure was characteristic of his administration as a whole: it had been found that while Angel Pestana was recovering from wounds inflicted by the civil governor’s pistgleros, another group of Anido’s gunmen was stationed outside the hospital with orders to shoot the Anarchist as soon as he emerged. The story was given wide publicity. By now, a more moderate Conservative government, again headed by Sanchez de Toca, had come into office, intent on achieving political reforms. With Martinez Anido’s dismissal there now began a remarkable pursuit in which the “Solidarios” tried to track down this man in order, as Sanz puts it, to “settle accounts.”

Anido simply went underground. In May 1923, the “Solidarios,” armed with submachine guns and bombs, tracked him to San Sebastian, but he had fled to La Coruna, where they pursued him again. Martinez Anido then disappeared completely. Although a general in the army and ex-governor of Catalonia, this worthy was forced to remain underground until the pistolero threat had been largely removed by repression.

While the hunt was going on, the “Solidarios” succeeded in locating Ramon Laguia, one of the chief pistoleros of the sindicato libre, whom they severely wounded in a cafe in Manresa. It was around this period that they also assassinated the ex-governor of Vizcaya and the Archbishop-Cardinal of Saragossa. The atentados against these dignitaries were followed by several daring robberies, the most famous of which occurred on September 1, 1923, when a group of “Solidarios” held up the Bank of Gijon, making off with over 600,000 pesetas. The raid produced a sensation throughout Spain and ranks as one of the largest “expropriations” of its day.

In the meantime, the Anarchist action groups were preparing an insurrection against the newly installed Primo de Rivera dictatorship. Arms were desperately needed. There now began a series of fantastic escapades in which tons of weapons were manufactured or shunted around under the very eyes of the police with a courage and bravado that would have seemed possible only in Spain of that time—and perhaps only among the Spanish Anarchists. The “Solidarios” bought an iron foundry in the Pueblo Nuevo district of Barcelona and put it to work manufacturing grenades and bombs. Some six thousand of these weapons were cached away in the Pueblo Seco district before they were discovered by the police—who must have been astonished by the group’s audacity. In addition, the group deposited caches of rifles and pistols in almost every neighborhood of Barcelona. A regular arms traffic was organized in which weapons bought in Belgium and France were transported clandestinely into Spain through the frontier town of Puigcerda or shipped in by sea.[32]

In October 1923, as the day of the uprising approached, the group managed to buy 1,000 rifles and 200,000 cartridges from the firm of Garate y Anitua in the town of Eibar. The insurrection never came off, at least not in October, and the weapons remained in the firm’s warehouse. Later, the “Solidarios” shunted them to a warehouse in Barcelona, where they lay for months while Anarchists in the city negotiated with Catalan nationalists over how to use this deadly largesse. When the two groups fell out, the weapons were sent back to Eibar where the manufacturer accepted them as “returned merchandise.” It is testimony to the astonishing effectiveness of the Anarchist action group that the purchase, movement, and storage of 1,000 rifles and 200,000 cartridges during a period of military dictatorship was never discovered by the police.

The “Solidarios,” in fact, had by this time developed into a far-flung libertarian enterprise. A partial list shows that there were at least thirty members, many of whom were prepared to leave Barcelona at a moment’s notice for an “action” elsewhere in Spain. Besides trafficking in thousands of weapons, operating a grenade foundry! and staging carefully planned “actions.” they were a source of considerable funds for various libertarian projects. Their “expropriations” sustained Ferrer-type schools. Anarchist printing presses, and a large publishing enterprise in Paris which produced the Anarchist Enciclopedia, as well as many books, pamphlets and periodicals. The group included men like Durruti, whose prestige by now was enormous, but if we are to believe Sanz, it had no leaders and no hierarchy.

Durruti earned his prestige; it was entirely the result of his personal courage and obvious ability. There was nothing in his background that made him distinctive: like everyone else in the group, he was a worker, perhaps with a-slightly better than average education. Born in the city of Leon in July 1896, of working-class parents, Durruti became an apprentice in a machine shop at the age of fourteen. Four years later he began work as a motor mechanic in a railway shop, where he joined the UGT and became active in the labor movement. His father had been a Socialist and Durruti seemed at first to be following the same political path. But he was a combative young man, attracted by the militancy of the CNT, and at the time of the August 1917 general strike he shifted his allegiance to the Anarchosyndicalist union. With the repression and black-listing of union militants that followed the defeat, Durruti left Leon to seek work further north on the Atlantic coast in Gijon. There he was befriended by Buenacasa and instructed in Anarchist ideas by the older, more experienced revolutionary.

By this time Durruti had reached twenty-one, the age of obligatory military service. He left Spain for Paris, wliere he met the Anarchist luminaries of the French capital and became increasingly involved in the libertarian movement. The upsurge of revolutionary activity below the Pyrenees brought him back to Spain after a three-year stay in France. He settled in San Sebastian, reestablished his contact with Buenacasa, and joined the “Justicieros,” a newly established Anarchist group. Looking for a more combative arena in which to work, Durruti then decided to move on to Barcelona. On his way to the Catalan seaport he stopped at Saragossa, where he picked up Francisco Ascaso, the man who was to be his alter ego in the years to come.

With Durruti’s arrival in Barcelona in January 1922, the “Solidarios” began to take form as an action group. A prime suspect, Durruti was obliged to use an alias and to operate in the twilight zone of the underground. The sheer nerve of the man is shown by the fact that, while in Madrid at an Anarchist conference, he paid a visit to the imprisoned assassins of Dato, an act which led to arrest and months of detention. The police were eventually obliged to release him for lack of adequate evidence although he was involved in almost all the plans—and, when he was not being detained, all the actions—of the group he helped to form. By December 1923 Durruti’s position had become so precarious that it was necessary for him to leave Spain and take refuge in France.

In fact, the “Solidarios” as a group was faced with dissolution. The atentados, bank robberies, and arms traffic had claimed a heavy toll of its most militant and active members. Ascaso was in prison for the assassination of Soledevila, although he soon made a daring escape, returning by rail to Barcelona disguised as a train Conductor and then making his way to Durruti in Paris. Eusebio Brau had been killed in the aftermath of the Gijon robbery and Rafael Torres Escartin was jailed and also accused of participating in the atentado against the Cardinal. In February 1924, the secret police (according to Sanz) had murdered Gregorio Suberbiela and Manuel Campos, two members of the “Solidarios.” Garcia Oliver and Figueras were imprisoned; Sanz and Alfonso, although still in Barcelona, were in and out of jail. The high point of the atentados and “expropriations” had passed and a new period was emerging, defined increasingly by the military dictatorship of Primo de Rivera.

What had the Anarchist pistoleros achieved? Were the atentados simply futile gestures, blind provocations that played into the hands of the authorities, who wanted nothing more than excuses to crack down on the CNT? This is the prevailing opinion among contemporary historians, while even most Spanish Anarchists today deal with the subject defensively and touch upon Durruti’s illegal activities with the utmost reticence. Yet this approach, like so much that is written about Spain, must be regarded as an oversimplification. However one chooses to assess the political consequences of the assassinations of Canovas in 1897 and of Canalejas in 1912, the fact remains that these atentados removed two of the shrewdest premiers in the modern history of Spain. They occurred in critical times—the period leading into the Spanish-American War and the exhaustion of Tumismo before the First World War—when decisive statecraft was needed to deal with a disintegrating political situation. The deaths of Canovas and Canalejas produced a serious vacuum in the leadership of the Spanish state. Most of the premiers who followed them were utterly incapable of dealing with the crisis and antagonisms that developed in Spanish society.

When the Catalan manufacturers turned to pistolerismo after the First World War, there could be no other answer than the counter-pistolerismo of the Anarchists. This macabre interplay becomes evident from an examination of Segui’s attempt to promote a moderate trade-union approach within the CNT. Segui’s approach clearly prevailed for a time: the union cut short the general strike of 1919; it joined the Mixed Commission, participating in it with the utmost seriousness; it followed a policy of collaborating with the UGT, even subordinating itself to Socialist policy in the August general strike. The employers, on the other hand, merely used the truce in the general strike of 1919 to mobilize their forces and launch a fierce counteroffensive against the union; they made a mockery of the Mixed Commission; and the Socialists turned their backs on the Anarchosyndicalists as soon as they were called upon to act resolutely.

For all its shortcomings, pistolerismo and a militant Anarchist policy in the CNT emerged as a result of defeats suffered by the moderate trade-union wing. A policy based on acquiescence would have demoralized the labor organization completely. The Anarchist pistoleros showed the more militant workers in Barcelona that in a period when the employers seemed to have a completely free hand, a force on their behalf was still alive, effectively answering blow for blow.

Finally, the Anarchist militants were not interested in “social peace” or in a restful period of trade-union growth. They regarded bourgeois society as incurably diseased. In their view, the opportunism of Largo Caballero and the reforms of Sanchez de Toca were simply half-hearted efforts to preserve a fundamentally sick society. Better to reveal the disease, to use the scalpel in removing the spreading infection, than to conceal the sores of the social system. The terrorism of the Spanish Anarchists was designed not only to keep alive the spirit of revolt and to provoke the Spanish bourgeoisie, but to undermine the stability of the social system. Thus emerged a policy of “destabilizing” capitalism which, as the 1930s were to show, catapulted Spain into social revolution. As we shall see, the Anarchists actually succeeded in getting the revolution they wanted. Without them, it is very doubtful if there would have been one in 1936. If their revolution failed, it was not for want of any effort to produce one.