Author’s Preface

‘With the crowd of commonplace chatterers, we are already past praying for: no reproach is too bitter for us, no epithet too insulting. Public speakers on social and political subjects find that abuse of anarchists is an unfailing passport to popular favor. Every conceivable crime is laid to our charge, and opinion, too indolent to learn the truth, is easily persuaded that anarchy is but another name for wickedness and chaos. Overwhelmed with opprobrium and held up to hatred, we are treated on the principle that the surest way of hanging a dog is to give it a bad name.’

Elisée Reclus

Since the official birth of organized anarchism at the Saint Imier Congress of 1872, no anarchist organization has been held up to greater opprobrium or subjected to such gross misrepresentation than the Federación Anarquista Ibérica, better known by its initials — FAI. Although the above lines by anarchist geographer Elisée Reclus predated the FAI by almost 50 years, they might well have been written as that organization’s epitaph.

The hostility of extreme right-wing commentators to revolutionary working-class movements is hardly surprising and need not detain us long. The following quote is included merely as an example of how authoritarian commentators attempted to calibrate popular attitudes in such a way as to present the FAI, the rallying point for the defenders of the anarchist constitution of the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), the Spanish anarcho-syndicalist union, as the agent of disharmony and the conspiratorial epicenter of mindless violence.

‘The other (great corporation) unites the men who profess anarcho-syndicalist doctrines, styling itself on the Confederación Nacional de Trabajadores (National Confederation of Workers) [sic]. It is for brevity’s sake designated as CNT. Its ruling committee, the FAI (Federación Anarquista Ibérica — Iberian Anarchist Federation) bears a name that strikes terror into the heart of most Spaniards. If ‘ruthless’ be the qualification fitted for the UGT [the socialist union], ‘bloodthirsty’ does not sufficiently describe the FAI. The members of both of these associations are recruited by methods most closely resembling coercion than persuasion, the flourish of a pistol being one of the most frequent. They are inscribed on the rolls without the slightest regard to their trade. One and the other furnish gunmen for social crimes, voters for the elections and militiamen for the front. These three seem the only activities of the UGT, the CNT and the FAI. To belong to any of these three justify vehement suspicion of criminality: membership of the last makes it certain. [1]

Present day attitudes toward the FAI have been and continue to be formed, in the main, by the works of Liberal and Marxist historians. More sophisticated than Arnold Lunn, these views, as the American commentator Noam Chomsky has noted, continue to be supported ‘by ideological conviction rather than history or investigation of the phenomena of social life.’ [2]

This study developed out of a sense of irritation that the same myths and distortions about the millenarian or manipulative role of the FAI in its symbiotic relationship with the CNT continue to circulate unchallenged. I was equally concerned to establish that indolent and intelligent commentators alike have sought to demonize the FAI — and Spanish anarchism in general — by cynically or unintentionally distorting the available historical evidence. Whether to reinforce their own political prejudices, refute their enemies, or plain ignorance or malice is immaterial; what is intriguing is that apparently diligent historians should adapt and perpetuate wild hearsay assertions such as those propagated by Arnold Lunn, making no attempt to distinguish between fact and fantasy. This is more than a simple infraction of the rules of historical hypothesis. Their failure to apply the rules of evidence in the case against the FAI not only undermines that case, but it also raises serious questions as to their intellectual and moral honesty.

In order to fully comprehend the role and function of the FAI it is first of all essential to understand three things:

1. That anarchism caught the imagination of a substantial section of the Spanish working classes because it reflected and articulated the values, lifestyles and social relationships that existed at the base of Spanish society.

2. That the predominant ideological influence within the major Spanish labor organizations between 1869 and 1939 was anarchism.

3. That the ‘conscious minority’ of rank-and-file militants who built up and sustained their unions through lengthy periods of relentless and often bloody repression were anarchists who sought, as an immediate objective through social revolution and the introduction of Libertarian Communism, a just and equitable classless and stateless society, a moral objective which brought them into conflict not only with the state and employers but also with their own union leadership whose immediate objectives were material.

There are two dimensions to this book. The first is descriptive and historical: it outlines the evolution of the organized anarchist movement in Spain and its relationship with the wider labor movement. At the same time it provides some insight into the main ideas that made the Spanish labor movement one of the most revolutionary of modern times. The second is analytical and tries to address from an anarchist perspective what for me is the particularly relevant problem of understanding change in the contemporary world; how can ideals survive the anti-democratic process of institutionalization? If this is not feasible, at least we need to be able to identify the turning points so that we may be able to counter the process.

In tracing the history of the CNT and the FAI it is clear that anarchist organizations, like all other organizations and civilizations before them, are subject to a process of rise and fall. Once they achieve their specific objectives even the most committed libertarian and directly democratic organizations quickly degenerate. From being social instruments set up to meet real social needs they become transformed into self-perpetuating institutions with lives and purposes of their own, distinct to and in tension with the objectives which called them into being in the first place.

My main contention is simple: briefly, it is that as the Primo de Rivera dictatorship began to founder in 1927 a struggle broke out between the non-anarchist leadership and anarchist base of the anarcho-syndicalist Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT). The leaders, that is, the members of the Regional and National Committees of the CNT, having become intermediaries between labor and capital, openly challenged the ideological objectives of the ‘conscious minority’ by seeking to overturn the federally structured anti-capitalist and anti-statist constitution of the CNT, as approved at the La Comedia Congress in 1919, in order to compete with the socialist Union General de Trabajadores (UGT) for hegemony over the Spanish working class. In their view the workers’ cause would only be advanced when all workers belonged to their union, something that could only be achieved by operating within the legal parameters of the capitalist and statist system.

To the ‘conscious minority’ of anarchists this threatened to transform the CNT from a revolutionary weapon which could eliminate the misery of everyday life into a reformist labor union which served only to perpetuate and legitimize the exploitation of man by man. The anarchist militants who constituted the base of the CNT responded by founding the Federación Anarquista Ibérica, an ad hoc federally structured association whose function was to reaffirm the revolutionary nature of anarchism and to provide a rallying point for the defense of the anti-political principles and immediate Libertarian Communist objectives of the CNT. By 1932 the reformist threat had been eliminated — democratically! — and the working-class anarchists who had spoken in the name of the FAI (although many of these, like Garcia Oliver and Durruti, had never been affiliated to the FAI) reverted to everyday union activity at Local Federation level or to conspiratorial revolutionary activity in the Confederal Defense Committee.

Instead of disbanding, however, or confining itself to acting as a liaison secretariat between autonomous agitational or propaganda groups, the FAI was taken over in mid-1933 by a group of rootless intellectuals and economic planners under the leadership of Diego Abad de Santillán, a man for whom abstract theories took precedence over workers’ practical experiences. With the coming of the Spanish Civil War three years later, the FAI had abandoned all pretense of being a revolutionary organ. Like the institutionalized CNT leadership it had helped oust in 1930–1932, the FAI had become, in its turn, a structure of vested interests serving to apply the brakes to the spontaneous revolutionary activity of the rank and file and repress the new generation of revolutionary activists among the Libertarian Youth and the ‘Friends of Durruti’ group. ‘Anti-fascist unity’ and state power were promoted at the expense of anarchist principles while the hegemony of the CNT–FAI leadership was imposed over the local revolutionary committees and the general assemblies. Its principal aim had become to perpetuate itself, even at the expense of the revolutionary anarchist principles that had inspired it: the instrumental means had become the organizational end.

Stuart Christie