6: Secret Society — Revolutionary Elite?

It has often been affirmed by Marxist and liberal historians that the FAI was a secret and elitist organization. In fact, the FAI never constituted a secret organization, nor did its militants operate in any covert way in relation to the CNT or attempt to keep their affiliation secret from nonmembers. Certainly, under the conditions imposed by the dictatorship or in periods of repression, membership of the FAI was not something to broadcast widely, but this is a far cry from the ‘mysterious and powerful… clandestine organization… made up of kindred groups similar to Masonic Lodges under the authority of a secret Mainland Committee’, as claimed by Trotskyist historians Broué and Témime. [40]

An indication of the lack of secrecy and poor security that surrounded the FAI can be seen in the fact that Primo de Rivera’s police and intelligence services appear to have been fully aware of the nature and object of the Valencia meeting. Shortly after it had taken place, the homes of the members of the Sol y Vida group, hosts to the founding conference and whose members constituted the first Peninsular Secretariat, were raided and members arrested. Fortunately, a quick-witted member of the Seville-based secretariat destroyed the minutes of the meeting before the arrival of the police. [41]

Neither did FAI meetings follow the closely guarded Masonic model as Francisco Carrasquer, a noted anarchist militant, observed:

‘If it was secret, how come I was able to attend FAI meetings without ever having joined or paid dues to the ‘specific’ organization? Because they were specific groups, affinity groups and nothing more… It was a perspective opened up for the formation of discussion groups to keep on the boil the topics that really mattered… the liberation of man and of woman, the social revolution.’ [42]

As an organization publicly committed to the overthrow of the dictatorship, the FAI functioned, from 1927 to 1931, as an illegal rather than a secret organization. From the birth of the Republic in 1931 onwards, the FAI was simply an organization that, until 1937, refused to register as required by Republican law. In fact the final crisis that led to the FAI’s demise as a federally structured anarchist organization was triggered by the decision to register.

Another common belief is that the FAI constituted a political elite within the CNT. Frank Jellinek, a communist writer, drew a parallel between the FAI and the Russian Communist Party:

‘By no means all members of the CNT are members of the FAI. It is as much an honor for a CNT member to be co-opted into the FAI as for a Russian worker to be accepted as a member of the Communist Party. The qualifications are an undeviating belief in the doctrines of anarchism, useful and reliable service to the cause, above all, capacity for “direct action”.’ [43]

Franz Borkenau added further confusion when he stated, quite wrongly, that ‘only members of the FAI could hold positions of trust in the CNT’. [44]

In fact, there was no individual membership of the FAI; militants were not co-opted into the organization, and for the most part deliberately avoided ‘positions of trust’ in the union. José Llop describes the process of recruitment thus: ‘As for individual entry, most of those who already enjoyed some standing in anarchist or trade union circles did not belong to the organization of the groups, or did so indirectly.

For instance, take [Joan] Peiró: he had no need to intervene directly in his group in Mataro. Whenever a comrade came along who was not affiliated to a group and who sympathized with us, he would join the group. The group was formed on the basis of comrades who had an affinity.’ [45]

Although all wage-earning FAI affiliates were expected to be members of the CNT, it must be emphasized that only a small number of anarchists belonged to the specific organization. During the dictatorship it is unlikely its national membership exceeded 1,000. Fidel Miró claims that although no one knows for certain the total number of FAI affiliates in Barcelona, generally considered to be the heart of the specific organization, ‘at no time, prior to July 1936, was it in excess of 300’. [46]

In the early phase, 1927–33, the FAI fell far short of providing what Gerald Brenan called ‘a nucleus of thinkers whose mission it would be to keep the movement ideologically pure’. Nor was it ‘a council of action for organizing revolutionary movements’, [47] or César M. Lorenzo’s ‘state inside the CNT.’ [48] Progreso Fernández, a member of the Ni Dios Ni Amo affinity group, gives a less sinister, insider’s, account of FAI activities in its early phase, a period he described as being ‘of very limited activity. In point of fact, we did not manage to get one anarchist publication off the ground.’ He claims their main activity was ‘primarily in receiving and distributing newspapers like Tierra y Libertad and La Voz del Campesino, reading and discussing books, ‘above all Kropotkin’, and in ‘atheistic propaganda’. He described his FAI comrades as having ‘a minimum of anarchist convictions in relation to their way of thinking and acting.’ [49]

José Peirats, anarchist historian and secretary of the Federation of Anarchist Groups of Barcelona, had this to say:

‘The militants of the FAI came from the CNT and felt themselves more cenetistas than faístas. This was the root of the problem. The FAI was more action-oriented than anarchist… It did not stand out as a school of philosophy and this damaged it enormously; the only attenuating circumstance was the corrosive atmosphere in which it was born and lived.’

On the question of forming a state within a state, he added:

‘The discovery of the Minutes reveals that the FAI did not propose to manipulate the CNT but to collaborate closely with it. Things only became more complicated later, after the split of 1931.’ [50]

Francisco Carrasquer also refutes the charge that the FAI formed a ‘state within a state’:

‘It was never its aim to act as a leadership or anything of the sort — to begin with they had no slogans, nor was any line laid down, let alone any adherence to any hierarchical structure… This is what outside historians ought to grasp once and for all: that neither Durruti, nor Ascaso, nor García Oliver — to name only the great CNT spokesmen — issued any watchwords to the ‘masses’, let alone delivered any operational plan or conspiratorial scheme to the bulk of the CNT membership. For one thing, each FAI group thought and acted as it deemed fit, without bothering about what the others might be thinking or deciding.’ [51]