CHAPTER XX. Lyon, and in prison again

Even though Lyon was a large city, police control was so lax there that it was hardly evident when Durruti and Ascaso arrived in early November 1927. Using false identity papers, it wouldn’t be hard for Durruti and his friend to find work and live tranquilly while waiting for the right moment to return to Spain. They would simply have to avoid hotels and be cautious. They found housing, work, a discreet daily routine, but not tranquility. These men of action, restless by temperament, could not sit on the sidelines and passively watch the days go by. They began to inform themselves about the state of the exiled anarchist movement in France and also about the movement’s development in Spain. During the fifteen days they spent in Paris after their release from prison, they found out about the underground conference held in Valencia on July 24 and 25. They also learned that participants at the event had forged the statutes of the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI), thereby uniting all the activities of anarchist groups throughout the peninsula. Spanish speaking anarchist groups in France played an important role in the creation of the FAI. A first step in that direction occurred when a national anarchist conference held in April 1925 in Barcelona entrusted activists in France with the difficult mission of coordinating anarchist activities inside Spain from abroad.

The militants who created the FAI also formed its Peninsular Committee—which was made up by Spanish and Portuguese anarchists—and decided that the organization’s base would be in Sevilla. The FAI simply built upon and revitalized the patterns of anarchist organization that had existed in Spain since organized anarchism first made its presence felt in the country: the affinity group was the basic unit, which linked with other groups for the purposes of collective action. What was new was the formation of Regional Commissions of Anarchist Relations; entities that coordinated the activities of all the groups in a geographic area. These Regional Commissions appointed members to the Peninsular Committee, which in turn selected the FAI’s secretary. The secretary’s role was to maintain contact with anarchist groups throughout the peninsula and the world between the organizational meetings.

Why had the Iberian anarchists created a specifically anarchist organization? There were several reasons for this, but ultimately it reflected the original sin of the Spanish anarchist movement, which was a product of the Alliance for Social Democracy. The Alliance had been formed in Spain under the inspiration of Michael Bakunin. Its purpose was to protect the First International against state harassment and also ensure that it did not descend into a species of corporate syndicalism that simply fought to improve the workers’ material circumstances. It advocated an unambiguously revolutionary struggle against capitalism and the state. This has always been the stance of the anarchists within the workers’ movement, who were direct heirs of the International.

In the early period from 1869 to 1872, the Alliance for Social Democracy and the International’s Spanish Regional Federation were interpenetrated with one another, but they were two distinct bodies. Although Bakunin had warned Spanish Alliance members about the problems that this could cause, the pattern had already been established. Thus, the existence of a separate anarchist group undermined Bakunin’s hopes of making the International in Spain fully anarchist, even though anarchists would always have a powerful influence on workers’ groups.

This is how the labor movement unfolded, with the CNT inspired by the anarchists, who maintained independent groups and carried out specifically anarchist activities on the theoretical and practical realms. And they would have continued in this way, if not for the phenomenal development of the CNT and all the unique problems that such growth presented to the workers’ movement.

It wasn’t possible to clarify the complicated relationship between the anarchist and workers’ movements during the period of violent strikes and bourgeois pistolerismo (from 1919 to 1923), but this changed when the movements entered a period of relative calm after the establishment of Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship in September 1923. The CNT then had to face a new problem: should it submit to the new government’s labor legislation (which presumed that the CNT would stop using direct action)? Or should it go underground (which entailed the loss of broad contact with the workers)? In addition to this issue, which was difficult enough on its own, there was another one that was no less significant: exactly how should they fight the dictatorship? The government could crush the CNT and the anarchists if they stood aloof from the other oppositional forces and of course that they could not overthrow the dictatorship alone.

Everything suggested that the CNT form an alliance with the other groups fighting the dictatorship. Those forces were democratic-bourgeois and reformist—even the Socialists and the UGT had officially adapted to Primo de Rivera’s regime—and collaborating with them implied a common political platform. In other words, it implied a political compromise. The CNT could potentially extract some practical benefits for the workers with such a strategy, but it would also mean the integration of the CNT into the government that would emerge after the dictatorship fell or, more likely, the CNT helping to destroy the dictatorship and put the reformists in power. Either alternative would disfigure the CNT and tie it directly the state. What really limited the CNT’s room to maneuver was its commitment to libertarian communism, its opposition to government mediation of labor struggles, and its rejection of the state. If the CNT abandoned its anarchism, then it would be free to form alliances with political parties and could push the government to approve laws that might offer material benefits to the proletariat. It was a stark dilemma; so much so that two different attempts to respond to these questions emerged after the military coup. Angel Pestaña and later Juan Peiró inspired one of the responses (their arguments differed, but their goals were the same). They asserted that the CNT should discard its anarchism, since that was the obstacle. That position took the name “professionalization of the unions” which meant, concretely, making them neutral in the class struggle. Pestaña hoped to resolve political issues with the socalled “associations of militants,” embryos or cells of the Anarchist Party. This is would be his response to the anarchist-labor movement duality. Peiró’s reply was less clear, but he essentially sought the same thing as Pestaña. Peiró began from an analysis of the class struggle and took the economic evolution of capitalism as a premise. Capitalists concentrated themselves and established the foundations of what we now call multinational capitalism through their monopolistic trusts and cartels. To fight capitalism effectively, the CNT should use this process as a model and organize itself in the same way, which is to say, by federations of industry at the local, regional, and national levels. It would create two governing bodies at the national level: one would be the National Committee of the National Committees of industries and, the other, a National Council of the Economy, with its respective sections, including the important one of statistics. In addition to the usual bureaucracy, this structure implied CNT’s acceptance of state legislation. Peiró did not speculate about the political representation of the CNT, because he assumed that it would have a political impact derived from its growing strength in the economic realm. Thus, while Pestaña and Peiró disagreed on some details, they coincided in their attempt to erase the anarchist content from the CNT.

How did the anarchists respond? There were also differences in the anarchist replies, although they too agreed in the final analysis. Some favored ending the anarchist-labor movement divide by making anarchism dominant, using the Argentina’s FORA (of the Fifth Congress) as a paradigm. Others focused on what was called the “link” (as it was universally known at the time) between the CNT and the anarchists. They believed that the division of activist tasks that it reflected—between union activists on the one hand and proselytizers on the other—was the best alternative. In any case, both tendencies wanted to maintain the anarchist influence in the workers’ movement.

There was also a third position, which Los Solidarios supported (although, for the time being, it is better that we speak only of Durruti and Ascaso). They began from the historical reality that Spain had only experienced a relative and unequal industrialization and that, as a result, the proletariat and peasantry had equal importance in its class struggle. The country had a population of twenty-five million, an active labor force of nine million, and a total of five million peasants. But the Spanish peasantry was different from the peasantry in other European countries, where agrarian reform had created a peasant middle class. There had been no agrarian reform in Spain. Latifundismo still existed in large parts of Andalusia and Castilla and there was a mini-latifundismo in other regions. As a consequence, there was a proletarianized peasantry with deep connections to the social struggles of the urban proletariat and that had expressed its adherence to libertarian communism or “instinctive socialism,” as Díaz del Moral termed it in his study of Andalusian peasant unrest.

If there was endless conflict between the peasantry and the aristocraticlandowner class in the countryside, in the industrial and mining zones the proletariat had to fight an anachronistic bourgeoisie—that was wedded to the dominant monarchical caste—or against the world capitalists who had asserted themselves in the country’s key industries. The class struggle appeared everywhere, in its most brutal and revolutionary form. The peasantry and the proletariat were equally desperate, in a country where the boundaries between the poor and rich were clear and precise.

And the state? What was its political foundation? The historical formation of the Spanish state rendered it into an unstable institution that could not rely on any type of national consensus. In fact, such a unified nation did not exist: instead, there were multiple regions that pushed toward federalist decentralism if not outright independence.

Ascaso and Durruti felt that it was their task, as anarchist revolutionaries, to exasperate the regime’s contradictions while simultaneously cultivating the revolutionary potential of the proletariat. That was their goal in their daily efforts to trigger the revolution. Regarding the anarchist’s role, they believed that their mission was to work among the masses and encourage their revolutionary consciousness. The CNT, inspired by the anarchists, was a propitious field for such an undertaking, as were the Socialist workers’ circles. But Ascaso and Durruti also knew that anarchists could not limit themselves to fighting for the material betterment of the workers and had to remain perpetually focused on their long-term revolutionary goals. Some of the more orthodox anarchists charged Durruti and Ascaso with anarcho-Bolshevism, but the accusation was unmerited, given their soundly anti-bureaucratic conception of the revolution and also their daily practice.

All of these questions were the order of the day in the activist meetings when our friends arrived in Lyon. It seemed as though the future of the revolution depended on the relations between the CNT and the anarchists. Discussions of these problems were particularly heated, in part, because of the inactivity imposed upon these exiles—who were so far from the scene of the action—and also due to the repression against exiled Spanish anarchists after the failed attack on Alfonso XIII.

To encourage activity among the exiled Spaniards, a group of anarchists advanced the idea of creating CNT sections in France in April 1928. But, since these CNT sections could not undertake public action in the country, they would work through the anarcho-syndicalist Confédération générale du travail-syndicaliste révolutionnaire (CGT-SR). Ascaso and Durruti believed that this distorted the subversive potential of the exiled Spanish anarchists and argued, first in Lyon and later at a meeting in Paris, that it was a way of dodging the anarchist movement’s fundamental problems. They asserted that there was no justification for creating CNT sections in exile, particularly because they couldn’t make demands for salary increases or undertake other activities that might improve workers’ circumstances. What was important, they said, was to continue revolutionary efforts oriented toward Spain, while also working with other exiled anarchists, particularly the Italians. While Durruti and Ascaso articulated this position in Lyon, Joaquín Cortés arrived in Paris after being expelled from Argentina for seditious activities. Ascaso and Durruti were close to Cortés, and had been active in the workers’ movement with him when they were in Buenos Aires. Ricardo Sanz and García Vivancos had also recently come to Paris (from Spain). After exchanging letters with all of them, Ascaso and Durruti decided that they should talk collectively and traveled to Paris in January 1928 for that purpose.

Ricardo Sanz’s reports from Spain were not very encouraging. Pestaña and Peiró had started a debate about the CNT’s future and the anarchist press ( Acción Social Obrera in Sant Feliú de Guíxols [Gerona] and El Despertar in Vigo) oozed with the effects of the polemic. Every meeting seemed to revolve exclusively around the topic, as two conflicted tendencies took shape and partisans forgot that such disputes had already divided the Valencia comrades. To top it off, various political figures were also launching idiosyncratic and futile conspiracies against the regime.

Cortés told them that the campaign for Radowitzky was the priority in Argentina. The FORA was recovering from its old splits and hoped to become the principle workers’ organization in the country. It had around 100,000 members, an extraordinary number given that the FORA focused more on spreading anarchist ideas than recruiting. But Cortés also pointed out that the comrades there seemed unaware of the growing threat of a fascist coup d’etat, which could lead to a bloody crackdown on the movement. Unfortunately Cortés was prescient: on September 6, 1930, General Uriburu carried out the augured coup and violently suppressed the workers’ movement and its leading cadres. He was especially merciless with the combative anarchists.

To all this, Cortés said, one can add the cycle of open violence that erupted in Argentina after the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. The vicious conflicts between the anarchists of action and those more inclined toward theory did not presage anything good. The figures that polarized this debate were di Giovanni, that blond youth who published Culmine, and Diego Abad de Santillán, who thought all insurrectionalists were nothing more than “anarcho-bandits.”

There was also another matter that brought Durruti and Ascaso to Paris: a meeting called by the Spanish speaking Anarchist Groups in France. Bruno Carreras had represented those exiled in France at the CNT’s national meeting in Barcelona that month and was scheduled to report on the situation in Spain.

Carreras spoke about how difficult it was for the CNT to hold itself together while underground. He also discussed the “link” between the CNT and the anarchists, which ensured the CNT’s independence from the state and the anarchist’s continued influence in the labor movement. “In France,” Carreras said, “we really don’t have that problem, but we should create CNT sections. To study this question, the National Federation of Spanish speaking Anarchist Groups in France has called a meeting in Lyon on February 19.” Carreras asked those present (approximately thirty) for a written statement pledging that they would attend the gathering. There was strong opposition to this proposal; many did not think that the CNT had any role to play in France. Carreras’s principal argument was that many Spaniards exiled in France did not want to be active in the anarchist groups but did want to work with CNT; that sizable group could ultimately be recruited into the anarchist movement. Cortés in a lively way and then Ascaso more calmly refuted Carreras and lined up on the side of the opponents. [196]

The meeting of anarchist groups took place in Lyon as announced and, according to the summary published by Prisma magazine, there was a hearty debate about the role of the CNT in France. We can be quite certain that neither Durruti nor Ascaso participated in the meeting, given the position that they articulated in Paris (and none of the groups listed in the report of the meeting had any connection with them).

Police arrested Ascaso and Durruti shortly afterwards. This time there was no scandal. They were sentenced to six months in prison for infractions of the laws on foreigners. They entered prison in April 1928 and left in early October with the same problem as always; exiled from both Spain and France and without any country willing to give them an entrance visa. [197]