The Spanish Civil War (10 page)

In the early years of the twentieth century, a number of rationalist schools were started in Barcelona aiming to give a more sophisticated version of anarchism, the most celebrated being the Escuela Moderna at Barcelona run by Francisco Ferrer, a mason, agitator, conspirator, gambler on the stock exchange, philanderer and optimist.
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These schools were radical educational experiments, in the tradition of Tolstoy, which, in the Catholic atmosphere of Spain, were certain to cause scandal: Ferrer, for instance, deliberately flouted convention by taking his pupils for a picnic on Good Friday. It was scarcely an accident that the would-be murderer of the King and Queen at their wedding in 1906 was Mateo Morral, employed by Ferrer in his publishing firm in Barcelona. Ferrer himself, on the other hand, almost certainly had little to do with the preparation of the Tragic Week in Barcelona, though he was tried and shot for being ‘the chief planner’ of it, on the mendacious evidence of a few radicals anxious to destroy him. (He was in truth executed because he had long advocated a revolution, even if he had not organized one.) Ferrer’s death gave the anarchists an internationally-known martyr and damaged the radicals, who had made inroads into the anarchists’ strength among Catalan workers.
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The government assumed that the anarchist labour federation in Barcelona had been the instrument through which Ferrer had worked, helped by the French workers, not to speak of international freemasonry; anarchists were persecuted; and the workers turned more and more towards them in consequence, and away from political programmes, such as those of the radicals. Thereafter, too, moderate labour leaders lost ground to more violent ones, ready to look romantically on the Tragic Week as a Spanish version of the Commune de Paris, an ‘epic’, if possible to be reenacted.

The Tragic Week led too to the formation in 1910 of the first nationwide workers’ federation, the Confederación Nacional de Trabajo, CNT,
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which was from the start dominated by anarchists. The CNT’s leaders combined the ideas of the survivors of Bakunin’s generation with those of Prince Kropotkin, Malatesta and Ferrer, and were also influenced (as Ferrer had been) by ideas from France, the articulate leaders of whose working class were in the full flood of enthusiasm for ‘syndicalism’ and the idea of economic warfare to the death. No doubt members of the CNT were still in a minority even among organized workers in Barcelona. But their verve commanded attention. Their tactics included sabotage, riots and anti-parliamentarianism, above all, the revolutionary general strike, carefully planned and ruthlessly carried out, which became the central hope of Spanish workers as the means of achieving the goal of ‘libertarian communism’. Since it was supposed that a properly timed strike would be immediately effective, there was no strike fund, nor could many anarchist workers have afforded to contribute to one. Nor, until 1936, was there more than one paid official of the union. At meetings, there were no agendas, and there were no headquarters, apart from the offices of the newspapers and the printers.

The World War intensified all Spanish labour’s interest in Europe. The Russian Revolution raised this preoccupation to the highest excitement. German agents were active in Catalonia, bribing both gangsters and corrupt anarchists to attack pro-Allied businessmen, also securing the services of the chief of the political section of the Barcelona police. The interminable governmental crises of the monarchy suggested to anarchist leaders that their hour was near. Membership of the CNT reached 700,000 by 1918, while over 200 anarchist newspapers and periodicals flourished—Barcelona alone listing 29 publications between 1900 and 1923.
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The power attained by the CNT over the Spanish working class in
Barcelona and Andalusia by the end of the World War presented a problem of its own, since it bred dissension between the purists, who would accept nothing less than a complete social revolution, and the more moderate wing which, while retaining the same goals for the future, nevertheless believed that some short-term alleviation of conditions was a worthwhile goal, along with a modicum of strategy, a few allies and a little knowledge of the international scene. The moderates were led by the ‘Noi del Sucre’ (the sugar boy), the nickname of Salvador Seguí, a sugar worker of oratorical gifts, and an enemy of indiscriminate terrorism. The attempts of the government to crush the whole movement, and the anarchists’ determination to preserve the advantages which they had won from the industrialists during the World War, led (as has earlier been seen) to a five-year period of gang warfare in Barcelona, between CNT militants and
pistoleros
hired by the employers. The struggle was begun in 1919 by a strike in the Barcelona electricity plant, La Canadiense. The government accepted an eight-hour day. But a combative management locked out the workers. A general strike followed, peaceful in intent, converted or provoked into violence. Seguí did his best to refound the anarchist movement on realistic principles. He even preached patience. But before long, most of the leading Barcelona anarchists, including Seguí and his lawyer Layret, were murdered, either by
pistoleros
in the street or while ‘trying to escape’ from confinement, the so-called
Ley de Fugas
(Law of Escapes).
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The civil governor, General Martínez Anido, fought the anarchists with every weapon he could find, including not only the rival, government-favoured union, the Sindicato Libre, but a special constabulary, the Somaten (a revival of a similarly named force of Catalan irregulars who had fought Napoleon). Violence and murder became day-to-day occurrences, political crimes accompanied by gangsterism, deaths of police, ordinary workers, and passers-by. Altogether some 1,000 people died for ‘political’ reasons in Barcelona between 1917 and 1923.

The Russian Revolution, meantime, presented at first a temptation
to the anarchist movement. Enthusiasm was greatest in Andalusia, where the years 1918–21 were thought of as the ‘bolshevik triennium’.
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In 1920, the national congress of the CNT sent Seguí’s chief rival, Angel Pestaña, to Moscow to report on the Russian Revolution. Like the socialist delegation, he was unfavourably impressed, especially by the persecution of the Russian anarchists. Pestaña therefore spoke in Moscow against the Twenty-one Conditions named as necessary for joining the Third Communist International (Comintern). He could not, however, make his report when he got back to Spain, since he was arrested on arrival and spent the next months in prison. In 1921, another invitation to Moscow resulted in the loss for the movement of its new secretary-general Andrés Nin, and some other intellectuals, who joined the communists: but this had no effect on the mass of the movement.
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Pestaña was soon out of gaol and, with the only one of Nin’s group to remain an anarchist, Gaston Leval, pointed out how quickly Lenin had organized police and censorship. The anti-communist faction triumphed, and the anarchists, instead of affiliating with Moscow, joined the new, small anarchist International, the International Working Men’s Association, AIT, with its headquarters in Berlin.
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The dictatorship of Primo de Rivera saw the eclipse of militant anarchist activity, most of the leaders being either dead, in exile, or in gaol: anarchist newspapers were banned, though not all their periodicals. Some rationalist schools were allowed to stay open. The more turbulent anarchist leaders, including a famous gang named
Los Solidarios,
gathered in France and directed forays across the border. Among these men a number of legendary anarchist warriors appeared: notably two inseparable men of violence, Buenaventura Durruti and Francisco Ascaso. Durruti was a railway worker from León, Ascaso, a baker and a waiter. Their most notorious crimes were the murder of the archbishop of Saragossa in 1923, the attempt on King Alfonso (in Paris) in 1924, and a celebrated assault on the Bank of Spain at Gijón. They fled from Spain, wandered through South America, and set up
an anarchist bookshop in Paris. Four countries, Ilya Ehrenburg later approvingly remarked, had condemned Durruti to death.
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These men and their companions were not, of course, common criminals. They were dreamers with a mission, characters whom Dostoyevsky would have been proud to have created. For some, Durruti was a ‘thug’, ‘killer’, or ‘hooligan’; for others he was the ‘indomitable hero’, with a fine ‘imperious head eclipsing all others, who laughed like a child and wept before the human tragedy’.
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Most of the
solidarios
believed that some alliance was necessary with other enemies of the dictatorship, and several of them, in exile, prepared to contemplate a long time of preparation before a real general strike. They also made plans for a revolutionary anarchist army in the style of Nestor Makhno, the Ukrainian, whom they knew.

In July 1927, at a secret meeting at Valencia, the leading militant anarchists left in Spain meantime formed a new society, the Federación Anarquista Ibérica (FAI), designed to resist revisionism. This became, in the next few years, a revolutionary élite dedicated to lead the masses towards realization of the right revolutionary moment. The FAI was not a centralized organization but instead a number of separate groups acting without cohesion: hence its weakness in crisis.

At the end of the dictatorship, and with the coming of the republic, this powerful, secret group—its organization and numbers were unknown
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—came more and more into dispute with the reformists, now led by Pestaña, who desired to establish a syndicalist
political
party which would have had much the same relation to the CNT as the socialist party did to the UGT. Another moderate leader was Juan Peiró, a glass-maker, who defined anarchism as ‘tolerance, nobility and anti-dogmatism, as well as the exemplary value of forming cooperatives of production and consumption’. The republic brought the movement face-to-face with a dilemma: one single document admitted that the republic’s constituent Cortes
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was ‘the consequence of a revolutionary act, in which, directly or indirectly, we have intervened’, but also pro
claimed that ‘we face the constituent Cortes in the same fashion as we face all power which oppresses us. We are in open war against the state.’
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The
solidarios,
on their return from exile, naturally attached themselves to the FAI. They were younger than old CNT leaders, such as Pestaña, and profited from the mood of impatience among the youth of Spain to press forward towards the uncompromising.

The anarchist movement had a clever tactical leader in the 1930s in Juan García Oliver. To Cyril Connolly, the English critic, he once described his aim as ‘to eliminate the beast in man’.
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But he had himself spent years in prison for murder.

The CNT was in 1931 divided on grounds of doctrine, geography and age. The workers of the cities, above all of Barcelona, could be regarded as syndicalists, and were still groping for that ‘vertical’ order of society suggested by French trade unionists in the late nineteenth century. Their plan continued to be that the workers in one factory should delegate members to a ‘syndicate’, which would negotiate with other syndicates all questions of lodging, food, and entertainment. The rural anarchists, notably in Andalusia, still represented an idealization of their own
pueblo,
whose inhabitants would cooperate to form a self-sufficient government. (The significance of the latter ideal is suggested by the second meaning of the word
pueblo,
which can be translated as ‘people’, as opposed to the upper or middle classes. The inference was that the latter were foreigners in their own town.) The practical consequence was that there was, in any given town, still at least one anarchist who maintained the CNT connection, who kept a black and red anarchist flag ready in an emergency to fix on the headquarters of the civil guard, living as the conscience of the place, and who could, given the opportunity for action, count on the support of many others—a fact which makes estimates of number illusory. Probably over a million and a half Spanish workers were anarchist in outlook in the thirties; but the ‘militants’ numbered no more than 200,000.
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Most anarchists believed that the CNT was not only a revolutionary organization, but the outline for a future ideal society as well. It was supposed that, after the revolution, the different
pueblos
would be linked together, for exchange of goods, to their neighbours in a regional federation, while it would collaborate with other federations exchanging statistics and surplus produce. Similar federations would be formed in towns, linking factories together with suppliers or importers of raw materials. Anarchist intellectuals would explain their views by saying that there was no hope of justice in any society unless it was first achieved among small groups of men. Many anarchists hated even the idea of property. Thus the anarchist youth, the Federación Ibérica de Juventudes Libertarias (FIJL), declared themselves against property since it was:

an inhuman injustice that a man should keep for himself wealth produced by others or even a part of the earth … which is as sacred to humanity as life is for the individual; because it has its origin in a violent and criminal exploitation of the stronger against the weaker, creating the odious existence of parasites … living on the work of others; because it creates capitalism and the law of salaries which condemns man to a permanent economic slavery and to economic disequilibrium; because it is the cause of prostitution, the most infamous and degrading outrage that society inflicts on the human conscience, condemning woman to make the object of commerce an act which is both the purest and the most spiritual known to humans. We are … against the state because it restrains the free unfolding and normal development of ethical, philosophical, and scientific activities of people and because it is the foundation of the principles of authority and property through the armed forces, police and judiciary …
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