13: 1931 — The Conservatorio Congress

The 1931 CNT Congress was opened by Ángel Pestaña on behalf of the solidly Catalan fourteen-man National Committee. These men represented a generation of leaders who had been compromised through their relationship with Catalan politicians and who had opted for pragmatic social reform. Their main criterion was that the Republic had to be supported until the organization could be consolidated and all threats of a rightist military coup overcome. They wished to transform a union committed to revolutionary change into the defender of the status quo.

The hostile undercurrents boiled to the surface early on in proceedings. Congress quickly became a battlefield in the struggle between the two tendencies. Francesc Arín and Joan Peiró spoke on behalf of the National Committee, reviewing the recent activities of the organization and outlining CNT collaboration, since 1923, with the political and military groups in the plots against the dictatorship. This admission appeared to come as a revelation to most delegates and sparked heated and angry discussions. Arín accused the FAI, the focus for the hostility of the National Committee, of hypocrisy. According to Arín it had been the FAI-dominated Catalan Regional Committee and the FAI Peninsular Committee, bodies with overlapping membership, which had originated and sustained the contacts with political and military elements, without consulting the CNT National Committee.

Collaboration with the new Constituent Cortes was another theme that raised fundamental issues at this Extraordinary Congress. Item eight on the Agenda read:

‘The position of the CNT with regard to the convening of the Constituent Cortes and the political, legal and economic resolutions to be presented to it.’

The inclusion of this provocative political proposition on the Agenda of an anti-political body was justified by the National Committee on the grounds that the Cortes was the ‘outcome of a revolutionary act in which, directly or indirectly, we had been involved.’[99]

For the anarchists the formulation of a petition for presentation to the Cortes — whether to do with unemployment, schools, teachers, individual rights, freedom of the press, speech or association — implied recognition of the legitimacy of governmental institutions. This was quite incompatible with the principles of the La Comedia Congress of 1919. The thrust of the collaborationist argument was that although the Republic might conflict with the revolutionary principles and objectives of the CNT, it was an improvement on the dictatorship. Consequently, they argued, a certain measure of trust should be placed in it. As Murray Bookchin notes:

‘Apparently, many delegates to the congress saw no contradiction between preparing for a revolution and voting for a minimum program that proclaimed the need for democratic rights, secular schools and the right to strike.’[100]

For union leaders such as Joan Peiró, a gradualist who believed in a war of attrition, or standoffs rather than spontaneous and full frontal assaults on the system, the problem was simply that the CNT was unprepared for revolution. It required time to consolidate and build up its base. The Confederation should, conceivably, he felt, overthrow the capitalist State, but it was in no position yet to reconstruct the free society subsequently. [101]

Congress finally approved the following ambiguous amendment to the motion:

‘We are opposed to the Constituent Cortes just as we are opposed to any authority which oppresses. We are still at daggers drawn with the State. Our sacred, noble mission is to educate the people to an appreciation of the need to join us in full awareness and to secure their and our total emancipation through social revolution. Aside from this principle, which is an integral part of our very being, we have no hesitation in conceding that it is our ineluctable duty to place before the people a scheme of minimum demands which it must pursue by creating a revolutionary force of its own.’[102]

Another hotly debated issue was the proposed adoption of new National Industrial Federations to operate alongside and complement the work of the sovereign geographic federations of the CNT sindicato único. The supporters of the resolution envisaged the Federations fulfilling two functions, one permitting the organization to cope more efficiently within the prevailing capitalist economy and the other in the building of the free society to come.

Proposed by Joan Peiró, the motion read:

‘The object of the national industrial federation is to being together all the unions in the industry which it represents and coordinate its industrial action on the technical, economic and professional level.’

These new organisms, it was argued, would function in parallel with the local, district, regional and national federations of single unions. The working class had to adapt its methods of struggle to the increasingly sophisticated structure of modern monopoly capitalism. Peiró continued:

‘The national industrial federations serve to focus the initiative and activities of the proletariat, divided by industry on a nationwide scale, in opposition to capitalism. They also serve to lay the practical foundations for the structuring of the economic apparatus of tomorrow.’[103]

The anarchists, defending the autonomy of the basic unit of the CNT, the Sindicato único, pointed out the centralizing, reformist and bureaucratic dangers that would result from the adoption of such a structure. Julio Roig, a delegate from the Santander Construction Union, challenged the supposed inevitability of the laws of the capitalist economy on which the resolution was based. He argued that, if accepted, the proposal would lead inevitably to all the industries being represented in one national center that would be the equivalent of nationalization:

‘That would mean a bureaucracy worming its way into our organization… The Confederation would give birth to a bureaucracy such as exists inside the UGT, or is to be found inside the German organizations and in England. Solidarity cannot be contrived. There is something more than professional and trade improvements; something represented in the doctrine which drives this organization of ours and we have to be consistent and, if we truly identify with our principles, we must stand by them. In return for improvements we must defend the cause, which is worth more.’[104]

José Alberola, a CNT delegate and FAI member, also repudiated the motion:

‘There are two very clear-cut schools of thought; one that places the stress on methodology, and the other which places it on the individual. Those who advocate industrial federations do so because they have lost faith in the element of purpose, and trust only in the ticking over of the machinery. And I hold that the machine does not create strength but, rather, consumes it; this being so, let us conjure into existence a mentality hostile to anything which implies the mechanization of the individual. Capitalist society is run through monopolies and huge corporations because it dances to a hierarchical tune — let us create a mentality inimical to that trend.’ [105]

García Oliver was another CNT delegate who spoke against the motion. He also expressed clear hostility to what he saw as the negative influence of the theories imported from the German-dominated International Workingmen’s Association, the AIT:

‘The Industrial Federations come from Germany and appear to have come out of a barrel of beer. The AIT are completely ignorant of Spain and know as much about it as do Azorin, Unamuno and Ganiver [prominent Spanish intellectuals — Author] — nothing.’

In spite of the powerful arguments of the anarchists, Peiró’s National Industrial Federations offered the majority of delegates a convincing counter and practical alternative to contemporary Spanish capitalism. Congress adopted the motion by 302,343 to 90,671 against with 10,957 abstentions. Had the FAI controlled or dominated the CNT, as alleged, such an overwhelming defeat would not have been possible. It should be added, however, that the plans for the National Industrial Federations were never implemented and were not even mentioned at the Zaragoza Congress of 1936. [106]

In the meantime the FAI, anxious to counter the influence of the collaborationists whom they felt would lead the CNT into an inevitable integration of revolutionary syndicalism into the State structure, had held its own National Congress immediately prior to that of the CNT. Those militants who belonged to the CNT and were delegates had discussed the motions and tactics they intended to pursue at the union congress. This practice of parallel congresses and conferences was to continue until late in the Civil War. Juan M. Molina explained the reason:

‘…the delegates were all union members and on this occasion they brought union resolutions… As secretary of the Peninsular Committee, I attended the Conservatorio congress. Although I took no part in it, I was, in that capacity, flanked by other delegates such as José Alberola, Progreso Fernández and García Oliver, all of whom argued the FAI case — which was shared by the vast majority of the delegations.’[107]

At the FAI congress the outgoing Peninsular Committee was strongly censured for collaborating with politicians and army officers both during the period of the dictatorship and in the run up to the Republic. Three of its members, Elizalde, Sirvent and Alfarache, were expelled for activities incompatible with the aims of the organization. [108]

The Conservatorio Congress failed to clear the air between the two main factions within the CNT. The atmosphere remained bitter and acrimonious with the National Committee denouncing the trabazón as ‘dictatorial’. Ángel María de Lera, Pestaña’s biographer, recorded that during the Congress he and some friends came outside for a breath of fresh air to find Pestaña sitting on the pavement, weeping. ‘I am in despair’, he told them. ‘I have dedicated all my life to the workers’ struggle — all my life — and now when I hoped to harvest the fruits you see what has happened. This is not unionism — he pointed to the theater — this is chaos. This way we can go nowhere. These men are either mad or malicious.’[109] De Lera believes that although he continued to describe himself as an anarchist, this was the crucial moment when Pestaña turned his back on anarcho-syndicalism and began thinking seriously about an alternative — the Syndicalist Party (Partido Sindicalista).

The radical mood of the Spanish workers, reflected by the growing influence of the uncompromisingly anarchist or insurrectionist tendency, caused considerable worry to the bourgeois politicians. The FAI, the ‘NCOs’, as it were, of the CNT, had not only captured the attention of the media and the imagination of the most radical section of the Spanish anarchist movement; more importantly they were ensuring the struggle was being steered along clear class lines.

The complexities of divisions within the CNT are disguised by the terms treintista and faista and it would be a misleading oversimplification to reduce them to such. In spite of appearances the FAI was never a cohesive body competing with the reformist unionists along clearly definable ideological lines. The FAI, or at least what the FAI represented to many anarchists, was simply an ad hoc association encompassing a broad spectrum of anarchist opinion within the CNT, one which was divided geographically, generationally, and ideologically.

Two main tendencies existed within the FAI in the period 1930–31: anarcho-syndicalist and revolutionary. A third, intellectual, tendency was also emerging at this time but the full consequences of this were not to become apparent until much later. The first drew its strength mainly from the older generation of anarchist activists and those based in the socialist UGT strongholds of Madrid and Asturias. Although close to Pestaña and friends, they opposed the class-collaborationist line. Many of these, like Joan Peiró, who was a member of a group affiliated to the FAI, did not believe the situation was propitious for revolutionary activism. They emphasized the educative role of the union and the need to preserve and protect the organic fabric of the CNT and build up a strong organizational base before embarking in revolutionary confrontations with the State.

Strong regionalist influences and hostilities were at work as well. Referring to the Solidarios/Nosotros group, Miguel Gonzales Inestal, a Madrid-based CNT and FAI member, complained that these activists were Catalan-based and their group had been ‘formed in the shadow of certain groups which wanted to control the CNT — although this was not part of the FAI’s founding principles — and succeeded to a large extent in its aim in Barcelona… Many times one could say it was the Barcelona tendency against the rest of Spain. Madrid remained solidly in the first tendency, although when the split occurred, it opposed the treintista movement as reformist.’[110]

The Asturian FAI adopted a position close to that of the Madrid groups over the interpretation and implementation of the social struggle. Ramón Alvárez, secretary of the Asturian Regional Committee of the CNT from 1933 until the defeat of the 1934 October insurrection, a FAI affiliate, and a member of Pestaña’s Solidaridad group, explained his members’ views to a National Plenum of the CNT in Madrid:

‘Revolution isn’t the same as a general strike which can be called for a certain day of the month. Revolution is a social phenomenon, which ripens in its own time, which man’s conscious influences, accelerates, retards, but which does not happen simply because one sets a date… In Asturias, we thought that those who believed Spain was ready for revolution were victims of their own enthusiasm — an enthusiasm we shared up to a point – instead of making a calm, lucid analysis of the situation’. [111]

Perhaps the key identifying feature of the ‘conscious minority’ within the CNT was their unshakable faith in the creative capacity of the working class to fulfill their own destiny — without the advice of ideological theorists or political leaders. This caused friction between the third sub-tendency, led by freelance intellectuals such as Diego Abad de Santillán (whose position had shifted from the abstract revolutionism of the early 1920s to an obsession with economic planning, a hallmark of corporate thinking in the 1930s), and the working-class revolutionaries whose ideas were rooted in experience and practice. Francisco Ascaso of the Nosotros group described the views of the latter in an article entitled ‘Nuestro Anarquismo’:

‘Our movement is often criticized for its lack of ideological content and this objection is perhaps not without foundation. Nevertheless, we are victims of a lack of understanding and misinterpretation.

‘If we compare our movement with those in other countries, I sincerely believe that its theories are not brilliant. But if the Spanish proletariat isn’t educated at the European level, it has, to even things out, a richness of perception and a far superior social intuition. I have never supposed or accepted that the problem of intellectual improvement can be solved by mentally accumulating a large number of theoretical formulas or philosophical concepts that will never be carried to a practical plane. The most beautiful theories only have value if they are rooted in practical life experiences and influence these experiences in an innovative way. This is how we operate and it is this that allows us to expect a lot from our movement.

‘I don’t pretend, far from it, that intellectual mediocrity is an advantage. On the contrary, I would like every proletarian, every comrade, to exhaust every source of learning. Since this can’t be the case, we must then act, taking into account the real possibilities of each person.

‘Anarchism has gone through various phases during its history. In its embryonic period it was the ideal of an elite, accessible only to a few cultivated souls who used it as a sharp criticism of the regime under which they lived. Our predecessors didn’t do so badly since it is because of them that we are today where we are. But comrades, the time for criticism is past. We are in the process of building, and to build, muscular energy is also needed, perhaps more so than the mental agility required for exercising judgment. I agree that one cannot build without knowing ahead of time what one wants to do. But I think that the Spanish proletariat has learned more through the practical experiences that the anarchists have caused them to live through, than through the publications published by the latter and which the former have not read.

‘One must try to increase, as much as possible, the theoretical content of all our activities, but without the dry and shriveled doctrinalism which could destroy, in part, the great constructive action which our comrades are carrying forward in the relentless fight between the haves and the have-nots. Our people stand for action on the march. It is while going forward that they overtake. Don’t hold them back, even to teach them the most beautiful theories.’[112]

It is important here to understand the sequence of events of the first 18 months of the Republic. By comparing it with the various accounts offered by liberal historians of this crucial period we can understand better how their political prejudices have come to color subsequent generations’ attitudes towards the viability of anarchism by turning the history of the unionist–anarchist dispute within the CNT on its head. Those who opposed the attempts to overturn the anarchist constitution of the CNT are presented as outsiders — FAI members, not CNT militants — and are invariably presented as ‘bully-boys’ and ‘extremists’ who drove the ‘moderates’ out of the union. [113]

These accounts are distorted by their insistence on judging the CNT against their own authoritarian model of the ideal union, one firmly controlled by an elite ‘moderate’ centralized leadership contending for a bigger slice of the profits. The CNT was in fact a federal organization, founded on the libertarian principles of participation and direct action, and committed to overthrowing capitalism and coercive, centralized power. Leadership did not come from the higher committees down but from the membership and the autonomous industrial unions.

Raymond Carr suggests that the FAI militants, whose ‘task as a semisecret pressure group was to permeate the CNT with revolutionary activists’, had, by 1932, not merely discredited the Republic; they had brought the CNT itself to a serious crisis:

‘Relying on the autonomy of the individual unions, FAI activists could propose revolutionary strikes against the will of the CNT leadership. When the leaders refused to sanction such activity, they were denounced as traitors. By these tactics the FAI gained control of the core of Catalan anarchism and its paper Solidaridad Obrera; in protest the moderates signed the declaration of the Thirty that denounced the FAI infiltration and its disastrous effects. Expelled from the CNT they sought to build up their strength by organizing ‘sindicatos de oposición’ (opposition unions). Frank speaking and resistance to mindless revolutionism had cost Pestaña and his friends the leadership of the movement and divided it against itself.’ [114]

George Woodcock, another writer, views the FAI in much the same conspiratorial and elitist light. He compounds his ignorance of the anarchist organization with a disregard for the chronology of events:

Partly because of the unity of purpose of the FAI and the almost religious dedication of its members, and partly because of the romantic appeal of the more flamboyant insurrectionary leaders like Durruti and García Oliver, the extremists were able to retain control of the CNT, to such an extent that they ousted the veteran secretary of the organization, Ángel Pestaña, and Joan Peiró, the editor of the Confederation’s paper, Solidaridad Obrera. Pestaña, Peiró, and a number of other leaders who distrusted the rule of the FAI in union affairs issued a public protest; since it bore 30 signatures, those who supported it became known as the treintistas. With an almost totalitarian intolerance their opponents engineered the expulsion of these dissidents from the CNT; but the reformists were not entirely without support, and a number of local unions in Valencia and the smaller Catalan towns followed them into minority movement’ known as the sindicatos de oposición.’[115]

For Gerald Brenan, the years of repression led to ‘the triumph of the more violent party’ within the CNT. ‘But the disapproval of the “tyrannical” leadership of the FAI persisted. [116] Broué and Témime have their own Trotskyist version:

‘Not all syndicalists were prepared to accept FAI domination. In 1931 many of the leaders rose up against the adventurist and “putschist” policy that was imposed on their union. Well-known leaders such as former general secretary, Ángel Pestaña, chief editor of Solidaridad Obrera, Joan Peiró and Juan López, called for a return to a more genuine syndicalist action, involving less indifference to immediate claims and more long-term prospects of action.’[117]

The revived combative and revolutionary spirit of the CNT, which has been identified as the effect of the growth of influence of the FAI within the organizational apparatus of the union — not its cause — did not take long to manifest itself. Within a few weeks of the end of the Conservatorio Congress, provoked by the unmasked hostility of Largo Caballero attacking the CNT from the privileged offices of the Ministry of Labor, 3,700 CNT unionists of the 4,000-strong Barcelona dockworkers announced their refusal to work alongside workers who did not have a confederal union card. On 6 July, 6,200 members of the CNT telephone union (out of a total workforce of 7,000) declared a national telephone strike. Caballero immediately broke the strike by creating a new UGT-affiliated telephone union, a move that provoked considerable anger and violence among the striking CNT workers who attempted to occupy the Madrid exchange.

By the later summer of 1931 growing popular impatience with the Republic’s failure to effect or even begin to implement genuine social and economic reform led to a dramatic and rapid deterioration in the situation Strikes, crop burning, land seizures by peasants, police violence and the arbitrary arrest of militants such as Durruti (June 1931) provoked increasingly violent confrontations with the forces of law and order of the new Republic.

The mask of enlightened bourgeois republican socialism slipped badly during a general strike in Seville when Interior Minister Miguel Maura declared martial law and ordered in the military. In an attack on the CNT-run Casa del Cornelio in La Macarena, heavy artillery was used and the Civil Guard killed 39 workers in the city of Seville alone and an unknown number elsewhere throughout the province. In his memoirs, Pedro Vallina, the Seville CNT leader, claims to have received information that the general strike was being deliberately provoked by Maura in order to break the CNT. Vallina and his comrades were arrested before they could call a halt to the strike and prevent the massacres that followed. [118]

In his statement to the Cortes, one that was approved by the Socialist Party (PSOE), Maura publicly declared the government’s intention to break the CNT and FAI:

‘My duty is to say to the CNT and FAI, seeing that they don’t accept the laws which govern work, that they ignore the round table committees (comités paritarios), the mixed juries (jurados mixtos) and especially the law of the government that for them there will be no law of association of meeting, nor guarantee which will protect them. Let them submit to the social legislation and respect the law which regulates relations between workers, employers and the government, and they will have the right to live normally in relation to the government.’[119]

The CNT responded tersely:

‘This is a decisive movement. Either we allow ourselves to be murdered, vilely, cowardly, in the streets, allow them to destroy our CNT, through the maneuvers of Maura, Galarza and Largo Caballero, or we launch ourselves into the streets, declare the general revolutionary strike throughout Spain and give final battle to these miserable characters who wield power and who machine gun the people in the name of republican liberties... and do away once and for all with these murderers, imitators and heirs of Martínez Anido and Arlegui.’[120]

As class tension increased that summer, divisions within the CNT polarized along clearly defined revolutionary and reformist lines. Radical arguments were replaced by muted and ambiguous statements from the leadership who identified the union’s interests with those of the bourgeois Republic. They stressed the need for internal unity to prevent a military coup and the disastrous consequences for the organization of divided opinion and premature action. Their main concern was to avoid anything that threatened or compromised the efficient working of the union apparatus.

Early in August 1931 the National Committee of the CNT issued a statement attacking its own militants for provoking ‘excessive conflicts’ which, lacking moral and material support, it argued, could not be won. It proposed that in future all member unions should obtain the agreement of the local, district or regional federation before going on strike. To continue to ‘abuse’ the autonomous rights of the unions was to place them in jeopardy and weaken the strike weapon. [121]

Augustin Gibanel argued the anarcho-syndicalist position stressing the overriding need for organization and preparation. ‘Each day it is becoming more and more evident that the social revolution is a problem of economic and social organization. Without it nothing would prevail in the present, nor could freedom be guaranteed after the revolution. [122]

Alejandro Gilabert defended the spontaneist anarchist position of the FAI:

‘Is the revolution a problem of organization? Is it not, on the contrary, a question of audacity which, in a given moment, sets in motion the impetuous force rooted in the hearts of the masses — which can be mobilized by frequent events which occur in the life of the people? Is it the economy which determines events, or the will of men?’[123]