Chapter 5 : Founding Aims

5: Founding Aims

The raison d’être of the meeting was: to aggregate, formally, into one peninsular association, the anarchist affinity groups of the three parent organizations, the exiled and dispersed anarchist groups of the Iberian peninsula — Spain’s National Federation of Anarchist Groups, the Federation of Spanish Speaking Anarchist Groups in France and the Portuguese Anarchist Union; and also to propagate anarchist ideas among the people. But most important of all, for the majority of those present, was the need to promote, through the CNT, the parent body to which most of those at the meeting belonged, the Libertarian Communist vision of society and the anti-political and direct-actionist principles adopted at the La Comedia Congress of 1919; and to defend these from the reformist threat presented by union leaders such as Pestaña.

Although it was never referred to directly in the minutes of the Valencia Conference, the haste with which the FAI was established within little over a year of the initial discussions reflects the unease with which the CNT activists who founded the FAI viewed the public and private statements, and, ultimately, the intentions, of the reformists, particularly those in the Catalan Regional Committee of the CNT.

The thesis that the FAI was a conspiracy by an anarchist elite to dominate and control the CNT, as some historians have suggested, does not stand up to analysis.[33] The chronology of events leading up to July 1927 indicate, rather, that the FAI developed as a direct response by rank-and-file militants to maneuvers by the national leadership of the CNT to overturn the revolutionary objectives and constitution of the CNT approved by the 1919 National Congress and reaffirmed at the 1922 Zaragoza Conference. The CNT militants who set up the FAI in 1927 had no need to ‘penetrate’[34] or seize power within the still clandestine and dispersed union, they were the heart and spirit of the Confederation. It was their views which held sway among most, if not all, of the confederal cadres who had sustained the organization throughout the years of clandestinity; their sole objective in relation to the Confederation was to prevent it being hijacked by any party-political grouping, corporatist, socialist or communist, and transformed into a purely economic union committed to working within the legally defined parameters laid down by the State and capitalism.

The allegation that the FAI had been set up to ‘provide a nucleus of dedicated and determined revolutionaries to inspire and control the whole movement’[35] was dismissed as totally false by founder member Progreso Fernández who felt there was never any real danger of the CNT falling into the trap of revisionism: ‘The only problem was that attempts were being made to legalize the CNT to compete with the UGT.’ He added: ‘Nor is it true to say that the FAI was created to maintain the CNT’s ideological purity. It is, of course, possible that in certain regions like Catalonia the FAI’s role was conceived like that, but it was not the case in Valencia.’[36] Despite Fernández’s assertions to the contrary, there seems to be little doubt that the FAI hoped to succeed in revitalizing the CNT, a strategy which had to mean combating reformism.

Another indicator that the FAI did not set out to create a homogenous and cohesive organization to control the CNT, or even its own affiliates, is reflected in the fact that the closest it came to publishing a statement of aims and principles was the manifesto ‘To Everyone’ published by the Anarchist Liaison Committee prior to its formal foundation. Coordinating opposition to the dictatorship and providing a focus for anarchist propaganda were obvious matters to be discussed, but the different groups in each region remained free to pursue their own priorities in the manner they felt best suited to their capabilities.

In Progreso Fernández’s view, the aims of the FAI were:

‘To combat the dictatorship, whenever this might be possible. With an eye to the short- or long-term future, to engage in propaganda to make anarchism more widely known — through newspapers and rationalist schools. We supported a labor movement of anarchist inclinations, what is now known as anarcho-syndicalism. As we saw it, class collaboration had failed: what we had to work for was anarchist unity.’ [37]

The minutes of the Valencia Conference show clearly that the prime concern of most of the delegates was to ensure that the libertarian principles laid down at the 1872 Saint Imier Congress (see above) predominated as the guiding spirit of organized labor in Spain. This view of the role of the unions was totally at odds with the gradualist concept of the improving effects on working-class values and conditions of labor through inter-class harmony:

‘It being understood that class harmony is an impossibility, that syndicalism, in pursuing it, has fracassed; we must seek anarchist unity. The labor organization is not only to improve the class, it has to work for its emancipation. As this is only possible in Acracy, it should be done by means of anarchism. The working-class organization should return to what it was prior to the dissolution of the FRE.’ [38]

Much of the first session of the Valencia Conference was taken up in establishing which groups would be eligible for affiliation to the FAI. Could, for example, special-interest groups such as naturists, vegetarians, Esperantists, etc., be considered for membership? The consensus was that all that could reasonably be asked of any group wishing to affiliate to the FAI was a commitment to seek unity of action with the other groups in the struggle for social liberation.

As to the role of the anarchists in their symbiotic relationship with the CNT, the delegates were unanimously agreed in the need to resuscitate the union, put into cold storage as a national body in 1924 by a somewhat arbitrary decision of the National Committee, and to reaffirm anarchism as the inspiration and organizing spirit of the Confederation.

According to José Llop, a delegate of the National Federation of the Anarchist Groups of Spain at the Valencia gathering, the sole function of the FAI, for him, at least, was to ensure an anarchist presence within the unions. ‘In conference, the groups organized themselves in such a way that trade union problems were dealt with by amalgamating the different views of the anarchists who were also members of the trade union organization or the co-operatives, etc. The union question predominated in the activities of the groups. That is, the group was set up for the sole purpose of being active within the union ranks.’ [39]

How were the anarchists to ensure the anarchist content of the CNT, an autonomous and sovereign organization? The FAI delegates, described by Progreso Fernández as ‘CNT working-class militants’, who had sustained the union during its years of clandestinity, resolved the thorny problem of how to bypass the reformist or potentially reformist National and Regional Committees and at the same time ensure the autonomy of both bodies. The solution was the creation of an organic bond, or ‘dovetailing’, through joint CNT–FAI Defense and Prisoners’ Aid Committees at local federation level. These local committees were to provide the anarchist militants with a voice and influence within the Confederation in the revolutionary areas of solidarity and direct action.

This special relationship between the specifically anarchist and unions organizations came to be known as the trabazón. Its purpose was to defend the CNT’s commitment to solidarity and direct action thereby safeguarding the union from being manipulated by state communist or collaborationist influences. It was to become the cause of much controversy and ill feeling among the reformists and gradualists within the CNT.