3: The Dictatorship 1923–1927

The attitude of the new regime towards the CNT was made clear within 10 days of the coup d’état. On 24 September 1923, Martínez Anido was appointed under-secretary of the Ministry of the Interior. General Arlegui, Anido’s ex-chief of police in Barcelona, the architect of governmental terrorism, was made director general of Public Order. Government strategy, however, proved not to be the expected brutal onslaught on militants or the outlawing of the anarcho-syndicalist union. The method of attack was an oblique one. By selective use of the law the authorities made it impossible for the CNT to continue functioning as a union: delegates collecting union dues were arrested on charges of embezzlement, records and membership lists were seized in government audits of accounts. In Barcelona, the nerve center of the CNT, police pressure was intense. Finally, on October 3, the anarchist activists in the union decided they had no option but to go underground and suspend publication of Solidaridad Obrera. This decision, coming as it did in a period in which the Spanish Communist Party was attempting to seize control of the union, caused considerable ill-feeling inside the CNT, particularly within the Catalan Regional Committee which had lost some of its most prominent leaders, not just Salvador Seguí, during 1923. A Plenum in Mataro on 8 December 1923 overturned this decision and Solidaridad Obrera resumed publication. Meanwhile, the socialist UGT, now fully incorporated into the state apparatus, was being promoted at the expense of the CNT. The objective of this strategy was to neutralize and displace the Confederation as the predominant voice of organized labor in Spain.

The assassination of the new Barcelona executioner on 4 May 1924 ended the phony peace between the CNT and the dictatorship. At an Extraordinary Conference of the CNT in Granollers later that month the union reaffirmed Libertarian Communism as its prime objective. This resolution was ratified by a majority vote of 236 to 1 — that of the Sabadell unions, who supported Pestaña’s view of unions fulfilling purely economic functions. The conference ended in confusion when the police surrounded the building. García Oliver was one of the few delegates who failed to escape. He was arrested and spent a year in prison. The Granollers Conference was the last semipublic act of the CNT under the dictatorship. It had refused to submit to the new social legislation drafted by the dictatorship’s new minister of labor, the UGT leader Largo Caballero, and was proscribed a few days later. Solidaridad Obrera was suspended once more, not to reappear again until 1930, and it was soon followed by most of the other anarchist and CNT papers.

The climate of uncertainty and exhaustion left in the wake of the murders of so many of the CNT’s most capable militants had badly impaired its organizational and agitational ability. The clandestine National Committee set up in Seville in September 1923 was arrested in December that same year. The National Committee that replaced it in Zaragoza lasted only until May 1924. From then on it became impossible to keep the CNT functioning as a genuinely national body. According to Julián Casanova, the Confederation was ‘a conglomeration of regional federations without any collective discipline.’ [23]

The repressive situation in Spain led to the forced exile and the disappearance into clandestinity of most of the more resolute and combative elements within the CNT. France and Argentina were the two main centers of emigration from which the anarchist activists began to plot the overthrow of the regime while others sought to reassess the question of anarchist organization.

The exile of the revolutionaries left an ideological vacuum within the CNT. This was soon filed by the more legal-minded and union-oriented elements in the union, a situation that exacerbated the friction between the main contending tendencies within the organization.

Apart from the broad base of the CNT membership, who could probably be described as traditional anarcho-syndicalists, generally sympathetic to the union’s anarchist principles and statutes, there were, arguably, three main trains of thought within the union.

The first group, represented by leaders such as Pestaña and others, were mainly to be found within the National and Regional Committees of the CNT and included reformist union members, republicans, socialists and Catalanists. This group stressed the economic approach, with the union offering an alternative form of organization for specific, defined relations of production. Far from being spontaneist, it was extremely rigid in its views and placed no trust in revolutionary spontaneism and little, if any, trust in the workers. Their main objective was the immediate legalization of the CNT no matter what conditions the dictatorship might lay down. To them anarchism was an abstract moral ideal, an unattainable aspiration within the real world.

They argued that the foundation of workers’ power, as had failed to materialize in Russia, required a methodical approach and for this reason they wished to turn the CNT into an ‘effective’ labor union. This objective could only be achieved through class collaboration and distancing the union from the ‘ideological’ influence of the anarchists, and by attracting workers of all political persuasions and beliefs. The pestañistas wanted to relegate and confine anarchist militants to an educational and ‘idealist’ role within the union rather than encourage them to exert leadership by example, the only true type of revolutionary leadership. This would permit the pestañistas to build and control a permanent command structure within the CNT, presumably so that Libertarian Communism could one day be imposed from above.

Pestaña and his union-minded colleagues in the Solidaridad group were firm believers in the ultimately improving effects on the workers of class harmony and of incorporating the middle classes, ‘the fountain of culture’, into the labor movement. This view was shared, albeit for different reasons, by the more traditional political elements who hoped to ensure the stability of capitalism by absorbing the workers into the system by offering a token amount of the surplus they produced.

The hijacking and perversion of the revolutionary process under the Bolsheviks appears to have triggered Pestaña’s final collapse of faith in any purely spontaneous capacity of the workers to organize and run their own lives. Although he continued to describe himself as an anarchist he had, since his return from Russia, come to believe that revolution was impossible while the broad mass of the workers remained ‘unprepared’ and ‘uneducated’. Disillusioned, Pestaña had adjusted his anarchism, like many ‘self-confessed’ anarchists before and since, to cope with the ‘expediencies’ and ‘practicalities’ of an imperfect world. In doing so his anarchism became transformed from a unity of theory and action into a mere code of subjective ethics and abstract values which had little, if anything, to do with his actual behavior. Gradualism and class collaboration were the means by which Pestaña and his colleagues came to deny the possibility of mass revolution and, hence, the revolutionary mission of the CNT!

Pestaña and other members of his Solidaridad group openly began to argue the case for a legally recognized (i.e. State- recognized) CNT. In March 1925 he made his first thinly veiled attack on anarchist influence within the union through the columns of his paper Solidaridad Proletaria. Intended to rally both the socialists and the non-anarchist and non-revolutionary trade unionists in the CNT, the article, entitled ‘The Anarchist Groups and the Unions’, broached his theory of the confederation as a ‘container’ rather than ‘contents’:

‘To begin with, the union is only an instrument of economic demands, subordinated to the class struggle and lacking any ideological description. Its objectives are class, economic, materialistic, and have nothing to do with questions of collective ethics or morals, of sects or party, which are those defined by the group.’ [Meaning, presumably the collectivity – Author.] He continued, ‘We repeat, what the unions and the CNT need is not the ornately designed ticket of anarchy, but the moral, spiritual and intellectual influence of the anarchists.[24]

Joan Peiró, another member of the reformist, i.e. non-revolutionary, Solidaridad group, represented the second group. His position was not much different from that of Pestaña, but he believed himself to be occupying a sort of middle ground between ‘pure’ reformism on the one hand and ‘pure’ revolutionary anarchism on the other. Peiró saw the unions in an independent role, but one in which he claimed he hoped the ethical influence of anarchism would predominate. This was equally reformist since it misrepresented the nature and role of anarchism.

Peiró’s subsequent history confirms him as a reformist. Anarchism he took to be simply a kind of philosophical social theory, a set of beliefs to which he hoped the workers would some day be won. In fact, however, and above this, it amounts also to nothing less than the expression of revolutionary consciousness by the working class. The anarcho-syndicalist struggle is the attempt to attain and at the same time give organizational expression to that revolutionary consciousness. The ‘direct action’ and ‘anti-parliamentarism’ which Peiró upheld were not merely strategies for the successful defense of jobs and working conditions — nor even their enhancement — but basic principles of working-class activity: ‘The emancipation of the workers is the task of the workers themselves’ ran the slogan of the First International. Peiró’s position was anti the class war, a term which conveyed not just the intensity of feeling and scale of conflict which the class struggle occasionally promoted, but the need to see the ultimate nature of the class struggle as one which would never be resolved until the final triumph of the workers, i.e. the social revolution.

Peiró tried to adapt the organization to cope with the constantly shifting problems posed by the rapid changes taking place within Spanish capitalism. He defined and defended his position against Pestaña in the columns of Acción Social Obrera:

‘We aspire to the unions being influenced by the anarchists, that union activity should have a determined end, in conformity with the economic concept of the anarchist communists; but all this without the anarchists acting in the unions as agents of distant groups and collectives… with no other objective than that of bringing to unionism… clarification and revolutionary efficiency… if the unions ever had this it was due to the anarchists.’

Peiró went on to emphasize what he saw as the proper and correct role of anarchists in the unions:

‘We want the anarchisation of the unions and proletarian attitudes, but not through the previous voluntary consent of these while maintaining the independent and collective personality of unionism.’ [25]

The third group, the ‘conscious minority’ of anarchist workers, represented by exiles such as the Los Treinta affinity group (a group which had grown up around Durruti and Ascaso of the now defunct Los Solidarios group), coordinated through the Anarchist Liaison Committee, were the anarchist heart of the Confederation. Enemies of all power, they firmly opposed establishing any relationship with employers and the state other than overt hostility. For this group of union activists, their practical opposition to the state was in perfect harmony with their theory; it was this harmony between theory and practice that set them apart from all other political groupings.

To the anarchists, the legalistic arguments sustained by pure trade unionists such as Pestaña, who sought successful negotiations with the employers and the state, involved compromising fundamental principles, surrendering greater future opportunities for all of mankind to illusory short-term sectional benefits — to say nothing of perpetuating the misery and exploitation of the dispossessed.

It was not the job of the anarchists to resolve the problems of capitalism or to negotiate mutually acceptable solutions between boss and worker, but to point out continually the gulf between oppressed and oppressor and to nourish the spirit of revolt against exploitation and all coercive authority.

Pestaña’s adaptation to an unjust world was wrong, they argued, if only because it is impossible to foresee what direction events will take. To choose a course that seems morally wrong, on the basis of suspect forecasts about the future, would inevitably lead to disaster — one for which they would be responsible because they knew in advance the fundamental mistake they were accepting.

An influential voice within the Spanish-speaking movement at this time was the Buenos Aires based paper La Protesta, edited by Diego Abad de Santillán and López Arangó, two anarchists who had experience within the Argentinian anarcho-syndicalist union the FORA — the Federación Obrera Regional Argentina.

Unlike most Spanish anarchists, Santillán was a bohemian rather than a worker. As a philosophy student in Madrid, he had become caught up in the revolutionary events of the autumn of 1917, and in anarchism. Amnestied in 1918 he returned to his adopted homeland, Argentina, where he became involved in La Protesta and the FORA, which he represented at the founding Congress of the AIT in Berlin in 1921. Describing himself as a Kropotkinist at the time, Santillán argued vociferously against reformist unionism in the columns of the bi-weekly Suplemento which he edited, encouraging the idea of a specifically anarchist national organization, in line with his obsession with ‘organizational efficiency and order’. From 1926 on, Santillán threw in his lot with Manuel Buenacasa, the editor of the influential confederal paper El Productor, published in Blanes, who advocated setting up in Spain a specifically anarchist labor movement based on the Argentinian FORA.

In an important study published in 1925 Santillán and López Arangó outlined what they felt the anarchist position should be:

‘We do not whimsically confuse the labor movement with syndicalism: for us syndicalism is but one revolutionary theory out of many which pop up along the path of the revolution to thwart its ends or clip the wings of the masses’ combative idealism. And clearly, faced with a choice between that theory and anarchism, we cannot hesitate for a single instance in our choice, for we maintain that freedom is attained only through freedom and that the revolution will be anarchistic, which is to say libertarian, or will not be at all.

‘The anarchist revolution will redeem men from the cardinal sin of abdication of the personality, but the anarchist revolution is not a revolution made according to this or that program, whatever the degree of libertarianism of the latter, but rather the revolution made by means of the destruction of the whole of State power and of all authority. It matters very little to us whether the coming revolution will be based upon the family, on the social group, on the branch of industry, on the commune or on the individual: what matters to us is that the construction of the social order be a collective endeavor in which men do not place their freedom in pawn, whether willingly or under coercion. The anarchist revolution is today the natural revolution, the one which does not let itself be sidetracked or confiscated by groups, parties or classes of authority.’ [26]

The Urales family with their influential magazine La Revista Blanca, represented a further group of ‘philosophical’ anarchists. These, seeing themselves as the jealous guardians of anarchist orthodoxy, distanced themselves totally from union involvement in order to ensure ideological purity.