15: 1932: Insurrection — The Revolutionary Gymnasia

For anarchists, social revolution is the ultimate collective instrument of the oppressed against the hierarchical and exploitative social and economical structure under which they are forced to live. It is the only means by which the old order can be displaced. Compromise with capitalism and collaboration with the State through the parliamentary process serves only to institutionalize misery, injustice and violence in its broadest sense.

With the coming to power of the Alcalá Zamora presidency in January 1932, working-class discontent with the frustrated and impotent bourgeois Republic boiled over into violent confrontation. The first incidents of the New Year took place in Arnedo, in Logro–o, on 5 January, when a number of people were killed in clashes between the Civil Guard and strikers. The wave of revolutionary militancy steadily gathered momentum. On 18 January the anarchist miners of Alto Llobregat, near Figols, and Cardoner, in the neighboring valley, triggered what they hoped would be the first hammer blow on the locked doors of the future.

It has been widely assumed that the cycle of insurrections that began in Figols in January 1932 were organized and instigated by the FAI. ‘The first days of 1932’, wrote Gerald Brenan, ‘saw a rising organized by the FAI in Catalonia’. [138] Hugh Thomas also confirms that these were ‘inspired by the FAI’ [139] as do Broué and Témime [140] and a number of other commentators. [141]

In fact the rising had nothing whatsoever to do with the FAI. It began as an entirely spontaneous local affair directed against a local employer, but quickly mushroomed into a popular movement that threatened to engulf the whole of Catalonia and the rest of Spain. In spite of the assurances of the first article of the constitution that Spain was now a Workers’ Republic, the wages and working conditions of the Catalan miners and textile workers had changed little with the Republic. In January, Juan Selvas, the deputy for Manresa, informed the Cortes that with two exceptions, the weaving and textile employers of his region had refused to comply with the nationally recommended minimum-wage agreements and workers in his constituency continued to be paid starvation wages.

The owner of the mines of Alto Llobregat was the powerful and autocratic Conde de Olano, a landlord who steadfastly refused his workers the right to organize public meetings or organize a union. Not only did the count own the coal and potash mines, he ruled over them as a feudal lord and master. He set the minimal wages the workers received for working in virtually inhuman conditions, the prices they paid for their food in the company store and the rent for the company houses. He wielded almost absolute power throughout the two valleys, including control of the Civil Guard.

Tension had been rising in the valleys for months. It finally came to a head in the early hours of 18 January in the remote mining camp of San Cornelio at the head of the Llobregat valley. That same morning the textile workers in nearby Berga had gone on strike over the refusal of the employers to comply with the Republic’s labor legislation and the government had proved itself incapable of enforcing its own laws. Anarchist miners, acting on behalf of a local revolutionary committee, spread the news to the morning shift that the inhuman conditions in which they had been forced to live and work for generations had ended and Libertarian Communism had been proclaimed. Money, property and the exploitation of man by man had been abolished. Armed workers quickly took over the key points of the town of Figols and seized the company store. The Civil Guard and the Somaten, the armed civilian corps, were disarmed without bloodshed, and informed that they had been relieved of responsibility for order in the area. The black-and-red flag of the CNT was run up on the church steeple and at the town hall. Not a shot had been fired nor a blow exchanged. Neither the bourgeoisie nor their agents had been strung up, no priests had been hacked to death, no nuns raped, churches burned or bars looted.

Within two days the revolt had spread down the valley from Figols to the textile and weaving towns of Berga, Balsareny and Salent into the neighboring Cardoner valley to Cardona, Suria and Manresa. The Revolutionary Committee of Figols, having seized the opportunity and proclaimed Libertarian Communism, then turned to the National and Regional Committees of the CNT to support their example. These higher committees of the CNT, totally confounded by the revolutionary initiative of the Llobregat and Cardoner workers, were uncertain how to respond to what the miners had done. Confederal militants Vicente Pérez Combina, Arturo Parera and Buenaventura Durruti were sent to Figols on a fact-finding mission and to speak to the workers. (Arturo Parera later confirmed that the FAI had not participated in the revolt ‘as an organization’. [142]) In spite of their report and pressure from the local and district Federations it took the National Committee six days before they finally decided to call a general solidarity strike, but by that time it was too late — the rising had been savagely crushed. [143]

These miners of Llobregat and Cardoner were not millenarians, madmen or dreamers who had heard ‘voices in the air’ or had been ‘distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler’. [144] They were practical, hard-working men, who had come to realize that if any qualitative change was to come about in their lives, it would only come about through a complete break with the past. To instinctive and natural revolutionaries such as these, ideas were irrelevant unless transformed into action. The abstract, theoretical, and fanciful anarchism of people such as Pestaña and Peiró was of no consequence when their diffidence perpetuated the tyranny and violence of their miserable everyday lives under the intransigent Conde de Olano and his fellow mine-owners and industrialists. They were fully aware that Libertarian Communism was not something that could be achieved overnight, or even planned. It was an aspiration, an ideal which would require tremendous ongoing commitment, but they knew that if they managed to throw off the shackles of capitalism and the State now, progress towards that ideal could at least begin with some degree of assurance that the main obstacles to the free society — exploitation and coercive authority — would not hinder that progress. By their example they hoped to provide the spark required to ignite similar hopes and aspirations among the rest of the Spanish working class.

Workers elsewhere in Spain did not share the mood of the Llobregat and Cardoner miners, however. The moment of revolution had not yet come and the miners’ unsupported challenge to the bourgeois and oligarchic order was brutally crushed after five days by troops sent from Zaragoza, Lérida, Gerona and Barbastro. CNT members were denounced by Catalan and Madrid politicians and journalists as ‘card-carrying bandits’. The hysteria provoked by the bourgeois press did, however, provide the extremists of the center, the republican and socialist parties, with an opportunity to promote the reformists at the expense of the so-called ‘uncontrollables’ within the Confederation. There were no trials for the arrested militants, all so-called faístas (no treintistas had been arrested). The Workers’ Republic sought to avoid embarrassing public scrutiny of the intolerable conditions which had provoked the rising in the first place and the excessive and selective repression with which it had been put down and the CNT activists criminalized. The authorities had used the opportunity to isolate the ‘conscious minority’ from the mass of what they took to be the neutral, a-political, mass of the CNT. Apart from the hundreds thrown into the prisons of Manresa and Barcelona, 110 confederal militants from Catalonia, Levante and Andalucia, most of whom had not participated in the rising, were deported to the Spanish West African colonies. Among the deported were rank-and-file ‘uncontrollables’ (incontrolados) such as Durruti, Francisco Ascaso and his elder brother Domingo, Gregorio Jover of the Los Solidarios/Nosotros group, and Ramón Vila Capdevila, who was to become in 1963 the last of the rural guerrillas to be ambushed and killed in the Pyrenees.

Although the revolt failed to trigger a nationwide insurrection, the spontaneous action of the workers of Llobregat and Cardoner proved a heartening inspiration to many activists within the anarchist movement. It had proved, they felt, more effective, in inspirational and practical terms, than all the written propaganda and revolutionary rhetoric of the previous 60 years. Alto Llobregat appears to have been read by the defense committees and activist core of the CNT as their cue from the workers that revolution was now a feasible option.

In the heady atmosphere that followed the January 1932 rising, the belief that revolution was now finally ‘on the agenda’ provoked renewed interest in ideas as to how the free society might be organized. There was a spate of articles and pamphlets exploring the theory and formulating a program of Libertarian Communism. One of the most influential of these studies to appear that year, perhaps because it avoided detailed theorizing on economic and social planning, was the article ‘Apuntes sobre el comunismo libertario’ by the Basque doctor and writer on preventive health care, naturalistic medicine and sex education, Isaac Puente Amestoy. The FAI Peninsular Committee were so impressed with it that they commissioned Puente to draft a more detailed exposition of Libertarian Communism, to be appear as a pamphlet. This work, the influential El Comunismo Libertario, was published in Valencia in 1933 and republished in Barcelona in 1935 under the title Finalidad de la CNT: el comunismo libertario. It was to be Puente’s ideas rather than the more economic ideas of Diego Abad de Santillán that provided the basis for the resolution on Libertarian Communism adopted by the CNT at the Zaragoza Congress in May 1936.

The treintistas, led by Pestaña, roundly condemned the Llobregat and Cardoner uprisings. This was read as an attempt to make political capital from the disaster at the expense of those who had died, been imprisoned, tortured and sent into exile. A split was now inevitable. In her famous article, ‘¡Yo Acuso!’ Federica Montseny publicly accused Emilio Mira, the Catalan Regional Secretary, of preventing the spread of a solidarity strike in support of the Llobregat workers in Barcelona to the rest of Catalonia. García Oliver accused Pestaña of circulating a letter to the regions informing each of them that the others supported a propaganda campaign against the deportations and not a general strike in support of the risings as had been agreed by the National Committee.

Pestaña replied that the strike option was only to be used to foil an attempt to impose a dictatorship. The national secretary’s failure to endorse a solidarity strike in support of the imprisoned and deported comrades finally opened the floodgates that were to sweep him away. Demands for his resignation poured in from the rank and file led by the 200 CNT prisoners in Barcelona’s Modelo Prison whose solidarity and trust, the cornerstones of the Confederation, he had betrayed.

Pestaña, his credibility and power base gone, was obliged to resign as national secretary in March 1932. Manuel Rivas, a revolutionary anarchist and a member of the FAI, took his place.

The February deportations had exacerbated an atmosphere already stretched to breaking point by vicious repression. Pio Baroja, one of the best-known novelists of the Generación del ’98 group of writers and philosophers, said on 5 February in Villena:

‘As far as repression and violence go, the months we have had of the Republic have produced more dead on the streets of our cities than 40 years of the monarchy.’[145]

The wave of revolutionary fever continued to gather momentum; general solidarity strikes were declared supporting the uprising in Grenada and Valencia while partial stoppages were organized in many other towns. Violent confrontations, including prison demonstrations, erupted all over the country. On 14 February the anarchist groups of Tarrasa, an industrial town near Barcelona, followed the example of Alto Llobregat and declared Libertarian Communism, occupying the town hall and laying siege to the police station and Civil Guard barracks. Similar actions took place in Andalucia, Zaragoza and the Levante. In mid-March peasants in Zaragoza, Puente Genil and Ciudad Real began to seize the estates of the large landowners. The Republic had lost its legitimacy and was becoming ungovernable.

At the end of April, in the midst of a massive wave of strikes, inspired mostly by CNT unions, an important Regional Confederal Plenum was held in Sabadell, a small industrial town near Barcelona. Present were more than 300 delegates representing 250,000 workers. The tide of rank and file opinion was by now obviously running against the treintistas with their commitment to a totally discredited Republic. The throwing out of Pestaña and Arín, both signatories of the manifesto, from the National Committee the previous month had signaled the beginning of the end for the reformists within the CNT. With the election of Alejandro Gilabert, a member of the FAI, as regional secretary of the CNT in place of the treintista Mira by the April Plenum, the last reformist stronghold in Catalonia collapsed.

In Sabadell itself, the members of the pestañista faction heavily influenced the local CNT federation. They had used it for some time in their political maneuvers to neutralize the anarchists within the unions. In a confidential report on the internal problems of the Spanish libertarian movement at this time, Alexander Schapiro, a member of the AIT Secretariat, noted:

‘They wish to use the Sabadell Local Federation as a lever with which some day to topple the regional committee — and, if at all possible, the national committee too, and to recapture the leadership of the CNT. Maybe the Sabadell comrades were unconscious of this ploy, but in effect, they became, albeit unwillingly, the instruments of revenge in the hands of the treinta movement.’[146]

Matters finally came to a head in September when the Sabadell Local Federation, in a gambit aimed at pressuring the Catalan Regional Committee to summon a national conference to condemn the revolutionary anarchist influence of the faístas, withheld payment of confederal subscriptions. The Regional Committee responded by declaring that by refusing to pay their union dues they were placing themselves outside the CNT. The entire Sabadell Local Federation was expelled on 24 September 1932 for defaulting on its basic obligation. A similar split occurred in Valencia where the local unions were opposed to joint CNT–FAI involvement in the Prisoners’ Aid Committee. They too withheld the confederal dues and were expelled by the Levante Regional Federation.

The breakaway unions, the sindicatos de oposición, representing around 60,000 workers, had their own Regional Committee but they did hope and plan for eventual reconciliation with the Confederation. They initially enjoyed some strength in Catalonia, Levante and Huelva but this position weakened considerably when Pestaña left to form his Syndicalist Party at the end of 1933.

Another important development in mid 1932 had been the founding congress in Madrid of the Federación Ibérica de Juventudes Libertarias (FIJL). The FIJL had been set up with the specific intention of countering the influence of the PSOE’s youth group the Juventudes Socialistas Unificadas (JSU). Although many of its members belonged to the CNT and the FAI, it was an independent youth organization. It soon came to be regarded as the third force of the libertarian movement. In Catalonia, a traditionally independent area, there was opposition to the motion of a national youth group. They preferred instead to form an independent organization of individual groups and local federations, collectively known as the Juventudes Libertarias (JJ.LL.).

The position of the FIJL with regard to the treintistas was outlined in a statement published in the national CNT daily:

‘It is no longer a question of tendencies — reformist or extremist — which separates us. Neither is it a form of procedure that varies within the confederal norms. What separates us irreconcilably is, more than our anarchist view of the union movement, a question of dignity and revolutionary sentiment. These ex-comrades have initiated a scissionist movement within the CNT with the objective of creating a union movement for the support of the Esquerra de Catalunya and its counterparts in other regions.’[147]

The final ignominy for Pestaña came with his expulsion from his own union, the metalworkers syndicate, by a majority of twelve branches to one against. Even his own section, the machinists, voted against him. In little more than a year the witch-hunt unleashed by the treintistas in August 1931 had ended by consuming its principal authors. [148]

Pestaña still refused to acknowledge the failure of the gradualist position within the CNT. In January 1933 he and his friends set up an organization inside the CNT called the Federación Sindicalista Libertaria (FSL), recruited from among the CNT union members hostile to the revolutionary anarchist line represented by the FAI. It was immediately tied in with the opposition unions among whom, for a short time, it played the same role as they alleged the FAI did within the CNT. The first secretary of the FSL was Ángel Pestaña. This was to be his last position within the libertarian movement (until shortly before his death when he rejoined the CNT). Juan López (who, together with Joan Peiró, became the main theoreticians of the reformist body whose principal objective, following Pestaña’s exit to form the Syndicalist Party, became reunification with the CNT) took Pestaña’s place.

The collapse of the reformist offensive within the CNT by late 1932 signaled that the FAI had served the main purpose that had brought it to prominence. The CNT militants who had spoken in its name and adopted its slogans quickly merged back into the confederal defense committees and everyday union activity. The active phase of the FAI as the defensive instrument of the CNT rank and file had come to an end. Instead of it disbanding, however, or reverting to what it had been during the dictatorship – a loose-knit corresponding society of local anarchist groups – new people began to emerge who saw in the FAI a useful vehicle for addressing and influencing the mass audience provided by the CNT. The vacuum left by the anarchist rank and file began to be filled by maverick theoreticians and planners who believed inordinately in their own mechanical and abstract view of social processes. By early 1933 these people had begun to transform what had been a working-class instrument concerned with practical considerations into an organic entity, with a life and will of its own, which indulged in abstract problems of a doctrinal or administrative nature. ‘There began to emerge’, recalled Progreso Fernández, ‘a form that failed to convince many of us anarchists: a Peninsular Committee was set up which, contrary to our ideas, arrogated certain powers to itself’. [149]