[1] For an explanation of the different forms of Anarchism, see pages 17–31 below.

[2] Engels, it is worth noting, clearly showed an understanding of the Anarchosyndicalist nature of the Spanish section in his article “Bakuninists at Work.” Surprisingly, this fact has yet to be adequately reflected in many current works on the Spanish Anarchist movement.

[3] Perhaps the greatest single failing of Bakunin is his inconsistency in translating his avowed organizational precepts into practice. For a discussion of this problem, see pp. 46–50 below.

[4] Which is not to say that the pueblo did not harbor the petty tyrannies of rigid custom, parochialism, superstition, and the more overt tyrannies of the caciques, clergy, and nobility. As we shall see, Spanish Anarchism tried to sift the more positive features of the pueblo from its reactionary social characteristics and rear its concept of the future on the mutualism of village life.

[5] In later years, the Anarchists were to adopt the black flag as a symbol of the workers’ misery and as an expression of their anger and bitterness. The presence of black flags together with red ones became a feature of Anarchist demonstrations throughout Europe and the Americas. With the establishment of the CNT, a single flag on which black and red were separated diagonally, was adopted and used mainly in Spain.

[6] The first and last of the words in this passage—compañeros and salud— have been translated here as “comrades” and “greetings.” They became the typical forms of address between Spanish Anarchists in personal encounters and at public meetings. compañero has a more endearing and familiar meaning than the formal word camarada, which was to be used by the Spanish Socialists and Communists. compañero connotes a “mate,” a “companion”—one who shares not only common ideas but also a personal relationship. Salud could be translated as “your health,” “your welfare.” It was adopted to replace the usual farewell address, adios (literally: “to god”), a reference to the deity that the Anarchists regarded as an invasion by superstition of ordinary discourse. In lateryears, a gathering of the Spanish Anarchists was to be called una asemblea de las tribus—“a gathering of the tribes”—a phrase that anticipates the sense of comntunity sought by the youth culture in our own time. The Spanish Anarchists tended to use more personal, sentimental, and cognatic expressions than those employed by their stolid Marxian opponents.

[7] This point should be emphasized. Nearly everyone who comments on the moral emphasis of the Spanish Anarchists treats it as a form of quasireligious ascetism. Perhaps this was the case among the rural Anarchists, particularly those who lived in pueblos, but my own feeling (after discussing the issue with exiled Spanish Anarchists from the industrial cities) is that in the north at least, this moral emphasis was similar to the efforts of black radicals in the United States to elevate their people from the influence of a degrading and enslaving culture.

[8] Only after Pi was removed from power did he try to establish a working relationship with the Intransigents, but by this time it was too late. With the collapse of the federal republic and the restoration of the Bourbons, Pi was largely ignored by his erstwhile followers and essentially became a theorist and a Proudhonian ideologue.

[9] It was Pi who ordered Velarde to march on Alcoy after the Internationalist uprising. On the other hand, the repression would have been very severe had he not been the president of the republic. In later years, when Anarchist terrorists were to turn public opinion against the libertarian movement, he courageously spoke up on its behalf. As Hennessy points out, Pi was admired by the Anarchists not only because of his moral probity. Pi died in 1901. Generalizing from his life, an obituary in the Anarchist journal La Reoista Blanca emphasized that “integrity in a corrupting society has a value which only those can appreciate who have wanted and succeeded in maintaining their public and private life untarnished.”—a characteristic conclusion for a movement that insisted on a complete unity between the two.

[10] These libertarian ideas and ways of life, as we shall see, stood in flat opposition to the capitalist relationships that were penetrating the countryside, especially after the communal lands were seized and put up for sale. The challenge of capitalism to the values of the pueblo constitutes perhaps the most important single source of agrarian unrest in Spain after the 1850s.

[11] The Seville congress was also the scene of an open dispute between the Bakuninist “Anarchist Collectivists” and the followers of Kropotkin’s “Anarchist Communism.” The Anarchist Communist position was defended by Miguel Rubio of Seville, the collectivist by Jose Llunas of Barcelona.

[12] The party was actually founded secretly in May 1879 under the name of Partido Democratico Socialista Obrero; in 1881 it was refounded, with nine hundred members, under the name of Partido Socialista Obrero the “Socialist Workers Party,” a name it has retained to the present day. I have followed the rather common custom of designating it simply as the “Socialist Party.” The supporters of the party early in the 1880s were almost entirely limited to the printers and typographers of Madrid. Pablo Iglesias was elected its secretary, a position he was to hold for decades. It grew very slowly, acquiring its first weekly, El Socialista, five years later.

[13] The usual figure given is four thousand (a figure that is often confused with the number who entered the city), but it is doubtful if anything near that number were around. Having decided not to participate in the march, many of them probably went back to their homes.

[14] “El Madrileno” disappeared completely after the workers marched into Jerez and was not to be found again. Pedro Vallina, an outstanding Spanish Anarchist who was on good terms with some of the participants in the Jerez uprising, regarded the young man as a provocateur. He also adds the name of Fernando Poulet, a Frenchman who appeared in Paris among the exiled Anarchists. Poulet, in Vallina’s opinion, was a spy in the pay of the Spanish embassy.

[15] As mayor, Salvochea had abolished the consumos (the onerous excise taxes levied on foodstuffs) and, to recoup the lost revenues, placed the tax burden on the shopkeepers. This act thoroughly alienated the lower middle classes, with the result that he was defeated in his second bid for mayoralty and the attempt to bring Cadiz into the Cantonalist insurrectionary movement failed even before Pavia’s troops arrived at the city.

[16] Years earlier, Ferrer had broken off with his wife, Teresa Sanmarti, a woman of fairly orthodox views. In a rage she had tried to kill him and he took up relations with Leopoldina Bonald, a young woman who shared his radical ideas. Later Bonald and Ferrer parted on amicable terms, and he went to live with Soledad Villafranca, a teacher in his school who held Anarchist views. The Spanish church and the reactionary politicians of the day exploited to the hilt Ferrer’s openness and freedom in his relations with women. In official Spanish society, it was perfectly acceptable to frequent, brothels, support concubines, and carry on liaisons with the wives of other men—provided that all the public amenities of marriage were respected and love affairs kept discreet.

[17] Toward the end of his life, Engels was to succumb with astonishing naivete to the political and parlimentary opportunities facing the Marxian parties of the late nineteenth century. In 1891, shortly before,his death, the old barricade fighter of the 1840s was to write: “One can conceive that the old society can grow peacefully into the new in countries where popular representation concentrates all power in itself, where one can do constitutionally what one will as soon as one has the majority of the people behind one; in democratic republics like France and America, and in monarchies like England... The German Social Democrats were to use observations of this kind with great effect in order to block Socialist supporters of the general strike in the Second (Socialist) International.

[18] Although Malatesta was to change his attitude toward syndicalism, he accepted the movement with many reservations and never ceased to emphasize that “trade unions are, by their very nature, reformist and never revolutionary.” To this warning he added that the “revolutionary spirit must be introduced, developed and maintained by the constant actions of revolutionaries who work from within their ranks as well as from outside, but it cannot be the normal, natural definition of the Trade Union’s function.”

[19] Henceforth, I will use the word “Anarchist” to describe Anarchosyndicalists and Anarchist Communists unless the difference between the two schools of Anarchism are relevant to the discussion. This is necessary because the two schools were soon to interpenetrate and for a time become indistinguishable.

[20] This story has been told in some detail because it is an example of those wild inaccuracies that appear in many accounts of the Spanish Anarchists and the Civil War. In his brief account of the “Tragic Week,” Gerald Brenan writes that “Monks were killed, tombs were desecrated and strange and macabre scenes took place, as when workmen danced in the street with disinterred mummies of nuns.” This lurid account may be excused by the fact that it was written nearly three decades ago in London, at a time when Brenan lacked adequate research material.
Hugh Thomas, on the other hand, writing in 1961, has less justification for repeating this account in his book on the Civil War. The story is not only repeated almost directly from Brenan but Mr. Thomas adds some sensational adjectives of his own. One now learns that “Drunken workers danced maniacally in the streets with the disinterred bodies of nuns.”

[21] The reader should be alerted to the fact that the Spanish workers’ movement was very officious, abounding in high-sounding titles for officers and “commissions.” Even to this day, the meetings of exiles’ union and radical organizations are formal, at least among the older people. The Spanish workers, like all pariahs in a highly stratified society, took the prestige of their organizations and the conduct of their business very seriously. To underscore this, alas, they could think of nothing better than to copy the ruling classes.

[22] Alberto Balcells gives a succinct description of how the new sindicaios were structured: “Each trade would form a section of the Sindicator and name a junta de Section of two or three members and a permanent commission of seven affiliates, changeable every six months, which in addition to directing the section, named the representatives of the section to the Junta del Sindicato. All of the sections would be represented equally on the Junta del Sindicato. Only the president of the Sindicato would be elected by the.general assembly. The Sindicato would be represented in the Local Federation and these in the Regional Confederation.”

[23] It was at this time that the National Committee of the CNT expelled the venerable Andalusian Anarchist Sanchez Rosa, who had been engaged in a bitter fight with the Regional Committee of the Andalusian Confederation. The expulsion created such acrimonious feelings between Anarchists and syndicalists that it nearly split the entire labor organization. The Anarchists now excoriated the sindicatos unicos and syndicalism generally, demanding a return to the old trade sections and a more libertarian type of organization. Although a peace of sorts was established between the two wings, the wounds never fully healed and were to reopen in later years.

[24] I do not believe this strike—which in retrospect has been regarded as a grave error—could have been prevented. That the workers were to lose their victory could only have been seen afterwards. Milans del Bosch plainly meant to provoke them and it is doubtful if the greatest prudence by the CNT could have avoided an eventual clash on terms unfavorable to the workers.

[25] The extent to which coercion was used in establishing the Mixed Commission is difficult to judge. At any rate, Amado offered an amnesty to the syndicalists of the CNT in rehirn for their temporary renunciation of direct action and their participation in the commission.

[26] Despite continual efforts by CNT moderates to come to terms with the manufacturers, the goading of the union reached scandalous proportions. So eager were the employers to initiate their planned lockout that they began one prematurely, on November 3. Compelled to allow the workers to return, the employers thereupon refused to take back any union activists. This provocation finally forced the CNT to withdraw from the Commissions.

[27] The Socialists were furious. Quite conveniently for the UGT, a newspaper strike broke out in the capital, threatening to blanket all press coverage of the CNT’s congress. The cenetistas, however, persuaded the publisher of Madrid’s popular Republican daily, Espana Nueva, to accede to the grievances of the typographers and the paper began to appear a few days before the opening of the congress. The agreement broke the unity of the publishers, who hastened to end the strike on terms favorable to the workers.

[28] Their delegation included Gaston Leval, who represented the newly created Catalan Federation of Anarchist Groups. Apparently Leval had been “integrated” into the delegation as camouflage, but he later separated from it.

[29] In the 1914 there were nine atentados against employers in the Barcelona area. In 1916 there were only eight; the next year, five; then nine again and in 1919, eight.

[30] The extent to which the CNT hired professional pistoleros has been greatly overemphasized. As a result of lengthy personal interviews with former Spanish Anarchists, particularly Gaston Leval, I am quite persuaded that the CNT’s resources at this time were woefully limited and that the great majority ofpistoleros were ordinary workmen whose activities were mainly defensive. The “hired” pistoleros, while not entirely a myth, have been given undue importance by most historians of the period and the “income” they acquired from their “actions” has been exaggerated to absurd proportions.

[31] By “activity” that is not in “contradiction with the purity of the ideas,” Sanz simply means a moral integrity consistent with Anarchism, not blind obedience to a political “line.” This moral integrity, as has already been pointed out, was a matter of great importance to the Spanish Anarchists, who otherwise always accepted complete independence of behavior and ideas.

[32] One of the most daring of the “Solidarios,” Antonio Martin, handled the transit of arms through Puigcerda. In 1937, Martin was shot down by gunmen of the Spanish Communist Party.

[33] All the more remarkable, it should be added, because it was during this period that the Solidarios and other Anarchist action groups staged the series of spectacular bank holdups at Tarrasa, Manresa, at the “Fonda de Francia” opposite the civil government building in Barcelona, and, most notably, at the Banco de Espana in Gijon.
It is also worth noting how Arthur Landis, the “chronicler of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade” (as one admirer designates him) treats this sequence of events. “In 1923” writes Landis, “the CNT, under Anarchist direction dissolved itself,” whereas the Socialist, “UGT did not do this; stayed alive, and helped lay the groundwork for the demise of the dictatorship and the overthrow of Alfonso XIII.” Such distortions are not uncommon from historians of virtually all political connections.

[34] The word “conditional” is used here to denote the fact that the CNT’s statutes had to be approved by the provincial governor. The union’s legality was still somewhat precarious in 1930. It is remarkable testimony to the influence of the CNT over the Barcelona proletariat that the government, despite Pestana’s strong stand in his negotiations with Mola, was obliged to legalize the union.

[35] Madariaga greatly exaggerates the ideological affinity of the Anarchosyndicalists for the Liberals. As we shall see, the animosity between the Socialists and the Anarchosyndicalists was so intense during the closing years of the dictatorship that the CNT workers voted for the Liberals out of sheer spitefulness.

[36] Throughout the latter part of 1931, almost endemic violence engulfed the Barcelona port area for example, where the UGT tried to undermine the traditional hold of the CNT on the dock workers.

[37] The long lapse between national congresses of the CNT should not be seen as evidence that the union was lacking in democracy. On the contrary, between national congresses the formulation of policy and initiative in action fell back to Regional, District, and even Local Federations. The need for coordinating or establishing policy on a national scale was usually effected through plenums of delegates from Regional Federations, but the regions and districts usually did what they wanted anyway, even plunging into near-insurrections without gaining consent from national bodies.

[38] The program of the Syndicalist Party is worth noting. The party called for a Socialist society based on economic self-management and federalism, the collectivization of land into free rural communes, and the coordination of industrial and commercial activities by the unions. The Cortes, in Pestana’s vision, would be replaced by a “National Chamber of Labor” in which the unions and rural communes would be fully represented. Pestana, although advocating a highly flexible strategy which included electoral politics as well as direct action, did not renounce his Anarchist beliefs. He regarded Anarchism as a moral philosophy which played a key role in educating and improving people until such time as they could establish a fully libertarian society.

[39] In all fairness to other members of Nosotros I have found no evidence that Durruti or the Ascaso brothers supported Garcia Oliver’s authoritarian views. If they did, it would have been more out of personal loyalty (a very important factor within FAI affinity groups) than a matter of considered political conviction or programatic agreement. “Los Tres Mosqueteros,” as Garcia Oliver, Durruti, and Francisco Ascaso were called, were by no means the same personalities. Brenan, in an excellent discussion of the matter, draws important distinctions between Durruti and Francisco Ascaso on the one hand and Garcia Oliver on the other, which I have confirmed through personal contact with Spanish Anarchists who knew all of them:
Durruti was a powerful man with brown eyes and an innocent expression and Ascaso a little dark man of insignificant appearance. Inseparable friends, they had together robbed banks, assassinated enemies of the cause and been in the forefront of innumerable strikes and acts of violence. Most of their lives had been spent in prison: as soon as they came out they returned to their humble work in the factory, for, naturally, none of the money they acquired by their forcible expropriations (on one occasion-they opened and emptied a safe in the Bank of Spain) was kept for themselves.... Garcia Oliver, on the other hand, belonged rather to the type of Irish revolutionary of 1919. Though a workman by origin and only partly educated, his political instincts were well developed. He was credited with a special flair for the revolutionary feeling of the masses and for the right moment for action. He thus became the leading tactician of this period and the organizer of its various revolutionary strikes and insurrections. Only, being an Anarchist, he did not remain like a general in the background, but led his men with bomb and revolver in his hand himself.
The simplicity of Durruti and Ascaso should be contrasted with the “political instincts” and “flair” of Garcia Oliver. These different traits guided Durruti and Garcia Oliver in two contrasting directions: Durruti became the head of a militia-column and was killed in Madrid; Garcia Oliver became—a minister of justice in the Popular Front government.

[40] Brenan’s account, although scanty, seems to be accurate enough with respect to the opening phase of the event. Peirats’ account is more detailed on its closing phase. Among the more grotesque features of the story, mentioned by neither Brenan nor Peirats, is that the partially burnt corpses were left on display as warnings to the villagers. According to press accounts of the event, the Guards were reported to have rounded up innocent villagers at Casas Viejas and forced them into the pyre that consumed Seisdedos and his party.

[41] (Missing footnote)

[42] (Missing footnote)

[43] To a great extent, the October events in Asturias are still little known to us. Gabriel Jackson quite rightly observes that, in addition to the political biases aroused by the events themselves, the Spanish press was censored until early 1936 and the electoral campaign of February in that year completely subserved the facts to party interest. “Since the Civil War, only the victors’ version has been documented in Spain. Needless to say, the thousands of knowledgeable leftists who fled Spain at the close of the Civil War did not carry documents in their baggage.” After sifting many accounts of the Asturian revolt, I have settled on three: Brademas’s brief but excellent summary, Jackson’s apparently on-site study (an account which suffers from an inadequate discussion of the Anarchosyndicalists’ role, particularly in Gijon and La Felguera), and Peirats’s splendid account. In my personal contact with Peirats I have been struck by his independence of mind and guileless candor—qualities which have greatly enhanced his credibility in my eyes—and I have drawn much of my material from his Los anarquistas en la crisis politica espanola.

[44] The reader would be well-advised to take such reports with reservations. It does not deprecate the role of the Mieres miners to emphasize that the Communists staked out a claim to nearly all the dramatic initiatives in the Asturian insurrection, although the union locals they actually controlled probably commanded little more than 3,000 members. Indeed, on the basis of my own researches and personal recollection of this period, I can say that the Communists in America as well as in Spain described the entire insurrection as Communist-led and depicted its goal as the establishment of a “soviet republic.” As the reader will see, none of these claims even remotely corresponded to the facts.

[45] I say “given” because these seats did not reflect the popular vote received by the parties but the number of seats they were allocated by agreement between the Popular Front coalition. I share Brenan’s view that the Republicans and Communists were probably given more seats by the coalition than they would have acquired had each party run independently. I would also accept his view that the Communists may well have received four times as many seats as they would have gained on their own; in addition to the 16 mentioned above, they received five from Catalan Socialists, who were now virtually under Communist control due largely to Stalinist infiltration tactics and the manipulations of Juan Comorera, one of the most sinister politicians of the left. Comorera was to engineer the Stalinist counterrevolution in Catalonia during the Civil War and eventually find a welcome home in Franco Spain.

[46] It is interesting to note that Payne makes no mention of this assassination attempt when he accuses the Popular Front government of showing bias in suppressing the Falange shortly afterwards. One would think from Payne’s account that the government was merely making “symbolic concessions” to the left, when in fact the Falange behaved with conscious provocation in its terrorist acts. Brenan not unfairly points out that in 1936 the Falange may have exceeded the much-maligned Anarchists in the number of atentados it attempted.

[47] It need hardly be pointed out at any great length, that the workers’ “labor power” was marked by their capacity not only to meet their survival needs, but to produce “surplus labor” over and beyond what was needed for the maintenance and reproduction of the working class. Hence “labor power” was also a unique commodity: it could be deployed not only to sustain the worker and his or her family (hence wages were seen as a “fair exchange” in the labor market at this level alone), but also to provide the capitalist with an increment, i.e., “surplus value” or “profit.” A “fair exchange,” however, presupposed that “labor power” would be conceived of as a commodity—a product, as it were, to be traded on the market like a tangible commodity— not as the onerous duty of a slave or serf on behalf of a coercive master. Marx regarded this concept of “labor power” as one of his most vital contributions to politcal economy, and, one may add, as a cornerstone of “scientific socialism.”

[48] The last two lines of this passage were momentous. These lines and others like them in Marx’s writings were to provide the rationale for asserting the authority of Marxist parties and their armed detachments over and even against the proletariat. Claiming a deeper and more informed comprehension of a situation than “even the whole of the proletariat at the given moment,” Marxist parties went on to dissolve such revolutionary forms of proletarian organization as factory committees and ultimately to totally regiment the proletariat according to lines established by the party leadership.

[49] Toward the end of his life, Marx in fact tended to accept the possibility that the European Socialist revolution would be initiated by industrially backward Russia rather than France or Germany. In his correspondence of 1881 with Vera Zasulitch, he entertains the possibility that a timely revolution in Russia would make it possible for the collectivistic peasant village or mir to bypass the capitalist development of the West and “gradually slough off its primitive characteristics and develop as the direct basis of collective production on a national scale.” For an interesting discussion of this correspondence, see Martin Buber’s Paths in Utopia (Boston: Beacon Press, pp. 90–94).