9: Unionism versus Anarcho-Syndicalism

By the winter and spring of 1927–28 the dictatorship had lost the support of the officer and professional classes and was drawing uneasily to a close. This led to a corresponding upsurge in working-class militancy. The CNT began to regroup its scattered forces. On 16 and 17 January 1928 the official FAI delegate to the CNT National Plenum held in Madrid proposed the trabazón, the joint defense and solidarity committees, as the most efficient and suitable way to link both organizations and prepare them for the task of confronting the dictatorship and easing the eventual reemergence of the confederation from clandestinity.

‘It is not proposed’, stated the delegate, ‘to create a new organization, but to connect like-minded organizations for the realization of activities and resolving problems common to both, forming committees or general councils which will harmonize and develop their relationship and avoid prejudicial friction.’ [67]

A proposal for joint FAI–CNT action committees, the forerunners of the joint defense committees, was accepted by the Madrid Plenum with little opposition, as was the joint National Prisoners’ Aid Committee. Clearly, at that point in time the leading spokesmen for the legal union position, including Angel Pestaña, then CNT National Secretary, did not see the FAI as an incompatible competitor. Indeed, it was the anarchist groups influenced by the Urales family journal La Revista Blanca who were expressing doubts as to the wisdom of the ‘understanding’ between the two organizations.

Pestaña himself endorsed the trabazón when the Valencia Local Federation of Anarchist Groups questioned its advisability. His reply, on behalf of the National Committee of the CNT, appeared to say that the FAI was entitled to intervene in ‘political’ matters, i.e. that the CNT was only concerned with economic demands:

‘Collaboration between the two national organisms (CNT and FAI) is not a confusion of the respective missions of both organisms…

There is the union question which is the exclusive competence of the CNT, but whenever the situation is such as to allow support from the FAI, and when there is another question which, by virtue of its blatantly revolutionary nature, may be described as political, it is only natural and logical that there should ensure close collaboration of both organisms on a basis of complete equality.’ [68]

That the FAI should have accepted the idea that the political struggle could be separated out from the economic is curious and difficult to explain; for anarchists there is only one class, one enemy and one struggle, and the latter can only be waged by one organization, not two!

The endorsement of the trabazón by an anti-revolutionary CNT National Committee is equally curious. Perhaps the poor resources and relatively minuscule membership of the FAI had allayed their fears. Compared with the CNT leaders’ apparently strong position within a mass organization which numbered its strength in hundreds of thousands, the 1,000 or so FAI affiliates could hardly have appeared to present much of a threat.

Perhaps Pestaña hoped that by formalizing the relationship and mapping out the boundaries between the two organizations friction could be reduced. There also appears to have been some confusion as to the composition and jurisdiction of these committees. According to Alexander Schapiro, the minutes of the Plenum do not refer to regional or local committees, only to a National Prisoners’ Aid Committee. [69]

While the dictatorship was drawing uneasily to a close, at the same time anarchist rank-and-file discontent with the attitude of the CNT leadership over the question of collaboration with political and statist bodies became increasingly acute. Pestaña and his unionist colleagues had almost completed the process of transforming the National Committee of the CNT into a body with a life and purpose of its own and views very different from the revolutionary objectives of the Confederation.

It would be wrong to argue that Pestaña acted as he did out of treachery, opportunism, hypocrisy or that he had in some way lost his moral sense. There can be little doubt he did what he did out of a sense of obligation and duty. Pestaña had come to believe that anarchism was compatible with capitalism and statism.

How had the revolutionary anarchist of the 1910s been able to cross the unbridgeable gulf from class war to class collaboration and still claim to be an anarchist?

Like anyone else in a similar position, Pestaña, a dedicated union leader, professionally committed to representing what he saw as the best interests of his members, had fallen prey to what Robert Michels has described as The Iron Law of Oligarchy:

‘It is organization which gives birth to the dominion of the elected over the electors, of the mandatories over the mandators, of the delegates over the delegators. Who says organization says oligarchy.’ [70]

Bureaucratic conservatism, inherent in all formal representative organizations, reinforced by the distorting effects of the years of clandestinity, had finally taken its toll. Pestaña’s moral and logical senses had acquired a radically different focus. He no longer saw himself as an individual morally accountable either to his own ethical yardstick or to the ‘idealistic’ demands of the base of a democratic organization whose contradictions were becoming increasingly apparent: demanding on the one hand piecemeal improvements and on the other immediate social revolution.

The ideals that had originally inspired him had now become an obstacle to the realization of his ends. He now regarded himself as the agent of an ordered, organic whole, of ‘building the new society within the shell of the old’ – the old socialist and revolutionary syndicalist dream, whose survival and growth took precedence over everything else, including his own principles and, if necessary, the wishes of the structure’s constituent parts, the autonomous industrial unions.

Mikhail Bakunin, an astute observer of human nature and politics, had warned of the inevitability of this outcome when anarchists were seduced into believing their ideas were compatible with statist and party-political activity:

‘This explains how and why men who were once the reddest democrats, the most vociferous radicals, once in power become the most moderate conservatives. Such turnabouts are usually and mistakenly regarded as a kind of treason. Their principal cause is the inevitable change of position and perspective.’

Nourished by the tactical collaboration with political and military groups for the purpose of overthrowing the dictatorship, something that many sections of the CNT had been involved in since 1923; as indeed had the Peninsular Committee of the FAI since 1927, the seeds of reformism began to sprout during 1928. Supported by his power base, the Solidaridad group which sought precisely those ends he and his colleagues objected to in the FAI, the wish to impose its hegemony over the CNT (it was also to be the seedbed of what later became known as treintismo), Pestaña stepped up his campaign to bring the CNT ‘in from the cold’ by agreeing to abide by the Corporation Law, the legislative brainchild of the dictatorship.

To unionist colleagues Pestaña argued that it would be a superficial compromise, but one that would permit the Confederation to reorganize and ensure a ready-made conduit for the workers’ demands once the state of emergency ended. If they did not re-form, legally, as he argued, they would be left behind once the dictatorship had fallen, a time that could not be far off.

Pestaña and his friends had fallen prey to the imperialist obsession to establish an absolute majority position within the Spanish labor movement. For Pestaña, the struggle had ceased to be a matter of principles, nor was it one of competition with Largo Caballero, the Socialist Party leader. What concerned him most was that the CNT would lose its ascendancy over the workers and leave the socialist UGT with all the advantages. He tried to reassure the rank and file, promising that the organization’s anarcho-syndicalist values and principles (i.e. those of a directly democratic union, based on the workplace, aiming at workers’ control) would be retained and nourished within a parallel, clandestine organization.

Pestaña, however, was saying something quite different to the authorities. In secret discussions with General Mola, the CNT leader clearly gave the director general of security to understand that in spite of the rhetoric, the objectives of the CNT were not those expressed by the anarchist rank and file. Pestaña sought to reassure Mola that power did not interest the Confederation and that it would look with greater sympathy on the regime that most closely approximated its ideal. If legalized the union would confine its activities to pure social and economic demands such as seeking better pay and improved working conditions. Mola recalled:

‘In so far as their aspirations were concerned, they were simply none other than achieving for the working class those legal rights which were due to them as producers… applying constant pressure to progress, little by little.’

It was assurances from union leaders like Pestaña which allowed Mola to state with seeming confidence that the trade union bureaucracy could be relied on to keep the rank and file out of militant action, although it must be added that he doubted their ability to do so. [71]

The renewed pressure from the national leadership to accept legalization, a move clearly to the detriment of anti-statist and social- revolutionary principles, reawakened the combative spirit of the ‘conscious minority’ who constituted the anarchist heart of the CNT.

Although they were a minority in the union, the anarchists exerted a powerful moral influence on the mass of the membership who, as Salvador Caño points out: ‘identified with the ideas of the FAI, and the majority of the confederal militancy responded to the anarchist spirit.’ [72]

The movement was also invigorated by the emergence of more dynamic elements of a younger generation of union militants. These young men had served their revolutionary apprenticeships defending their class interests not only in the factories, but also on the streets where they stood against the gunmen (pistoleros) sent out to shoot them down by intransigent employers’ and government agencies.

For them the emergence of the FAI with its reaffirmation of fundamental anarchist principles reflected the spirit of the age; it also provided a convenient banner around which they could rally the broad mass of confederal unionists to the defense of those principles. Faced with a radical groundswell by the rank and file and anxious to defend the union organization at any cost from what they saw as the disastrous consequences of upholding revolutionary theory and practice, Pestaña and his colleagues began to pull out all the stops in order to neutralize resurgent anarchist influence within the CNT. Under pressure from the CNT members rather than its own initiative, the FAI gradually became the instrument and focus for opposition to the legalitarian union faction that dominated the National Committee.

One solution the Solidaridad group came up with was to set up their own answer to the FAI, the so-called Union of Militants, and an organization that would compete with the FAI for influence within the CNT. Joan Peiró, a member of both the FAI and the Solidaridad group, attempted to mediate between the two factions within the CNT, but the ideological gulf which separated them was by now unbridgeable and growing wider by the day.

Pestaña had attempted to force this issue to a head in April 1928 with a series of articles in the Vigo CNT paper Despertad! Under the heading ‘Situémonos!’ (Where We Stand!) he had called on the base of the CNT to reconsider its position. The unions, he urged, should be free to adapt itself ‘to accommodate all manner of principles’. They were not tools that, in the hands of the anarchist groups, would permit them to impose their values on the majority.

He also proposed that the workers should be organized by profession rather than through the federally structured and autonomous industrial unions. This fundamental structural change in the organization, if accepted, would clearly have strengthened the influence of the higher committees at the expense of the membership. In effect, what Pestaña was proposing was, in anarchist terms, nothing short of degenerate. It was a classical piece of political sophistry, aimed to divide, disempower, and delay, similar to that which emerged during the British miners’ strike of 1984–85, in the form of the demand by politicians of all major political parties for the balloting of the individual union members instead if the age-old practice of reaching collective decisions in the workplace general assembly, where are gathered all trades and skills, by open voting after full debate, with decisions immediately binding voting, in point of fact, as members of parliaments do, if parliaments can by any stretch be called ‘workplaces’. While claiming to defend democratic values by ‘giving the unions back to their members’, the authors of such proposals actually seek to destroy the class content of the unions and their organic function and structure, making them little more than coffin clubs.

To Joan Peiró (whose own position, belonging as he did to both organizations, was, to say the least, ambivalent), Pestaña’s maneuvering was an outright perversion and betrayal of the principles of the CNT. He vigorously denounced his erstwhile comrade’s proposals in Acción Social Obrera as ‘deviationist’, class collaborationist and leading, ultimately, to a legally tamed union:

‘In “¡Situémonos!” we have examined the hasty assertion that “the Confederation” is its content, not a “container” [i.e. that the CNT should be ideologically neutral – Author], which means to say that the CNT is not the expression of enduring principles but can adapt itself to all manner of precepts however reformist these may be. This, of itself, is tantamount to claiming that “principles are made by men” (is there anyone who believes them to be God’s work?) and that “men have it in their power to change them”, and so on. No. Let me tell comrade Saltor and all the Pestañas that may have been or are yet to come that, yes, the CNT’s principles are susceptible to change and adjustment insofar as they affect the process of economic, political and social change (to some effect and with ineluctable imperatives), but that the CNT has certain basic precepts whose essential and enduring nature cannot be forsworn.

‘The confederal congresses can change all of the principles of the CNT should they deem such amendment necessary. What no congress may do, much less any man, no matter how well endowed with a “grasp of reality” and a “practical mentality”, is renounce the principles which are the CNT’s essential premise, its foundation, and raison d’être… its anti-parliamentarism and direct action.

‘What I have been saying amounts to a declaration that, were it possible to speak freely today at a regular congress, then everything amenable would be amended… but the CNT’s two basic and intangible principles — direct action and anti-parliamentarism — would remain. Otherwise the CNT would lose its raison d’être. And what I am defending here is nothing more than that which gives the CNT its raison d’être.’[73]

The FAI enters the debate

In spite of the oft-repeated charges that the FAI provoked the split within the CNT, the truth of the matter is that it did not enter the debate between the unionist and anarchist wings of the CNT until fairly late in the day.

Its first public pronouncement on the subject was a statement issued by the Peninsular Committee in December 1929. It denounced as naive the idea that the labor movement could be ideologically neutral. If the anarchists withdrew their influence from the CNT, other groups such as communists, Catholics, or any other power-seeking group — including any composed of those trade unionists who were interested only in protection and progress within the wage system – would quickly attempt to fill the vacuum. The statement also seems to suggest the implicit threat that FAI members would withdraw from the CNT if the CNT refused to recognize the FAI!:

‘It is sophistry to believe in the neutrality of the labor movement and in the independence of trade unions in terms of their ideological outlook and subversive propaganda, especially since by their very nature as liberatory movements and their undeniable implications for society, they cannot, in any way, escape the more or less preponderant influences of those ideologies which seek hegemony over society. More especially since the entirety of their moral and sociological consequences is the product of the most powerful minority at work within their ranks. This is why we find so many labor movements on the international scene with corresponding social, political and religious inclinations.

‘Every labor movement, whatever its nature, whether it be an imperative of the capitalist, statist system, or has its origins in a condition of political inferiority and economic inequality which afflicts the workers, or whether its short-term activity focuses upon the pursuit of material and moral improvements… cannot, and should not, forget that, in its field, albeit displaying different characteristics and features, there are other social movements which are also struggling towards and desirous of, not merely the economic betterment of the oppressed and humanization of the labor which these perform, but also of the absolute eradication of the prevailing blights and the complete disappearance of all political and economic privileges.

‘Hence the need for the CNT (if it truly wishes its activity to be transcendental and demolitionist in the most comprehensive sense of the words) to seek an accommodation with that organism which sees eye to eye with its tactical procedures and agrees with its premise, without thereby — let us say it again — without thereby losing its peculiar independence. On the other hand, should the CNT not accept the proposition formulated by this Secretariat, it is highly likely that it runs the risk of a deviation greatly detrimental to its cause of comprehensive recovery and of losing that moral and revolutionary value which is its distinguishing feature unless… through the unstinting work of anarchists, it openly describes and declares itself anarchist.’ [74]

The sharp difference in perception between leadership and base as to realizable objectives increased the friction within the CNT.

Pestaña’s proposal that it should ‘adapt to reality’ and form a lawful and compliant union organization, abandoning the undiluted revolutionary principles of the CNT in the process, evoked such intense feeling that Pestaña was obliged to resign as secretary of the National Committee of the CNT (although he did remain a member of the NC). He publicly denounced the union as being organizationally defunct and devoid of members. Events were soon to prove him wrong.

The Primo de Rivera dictatorship finally collapsed at the end of 1929. Alfonso XIII appointed General Berenguer as premier and promised elections but the working class and the bourgeoisie sensed the weakness of the old regime and began to press on for the final confrontation.

On the economic front the value of the peseta had dropped to almost unheard-of levels. As unrest grew among the professional classes and the commercial and manufacturing bourgeoisie, so too did the number of strikes and disturbances among the workers. The CNT, dismissed the previous year by its own leader Ángel Pestaña as ‘an empty shell’, erupted back on the scene with renewed vigor and vitality. Membership soared to 800,000. Anarchist newspapers once again began to circulate openly on the streets.

It could be argued that from late 1929 the general perception of the FAI was as much a hybrid created by the bourgeois press, déclassé freelance intellectuals such as Diego Abad de Santillán, and the reformists, as it was any reflection of the words and actions of a collection of militants. The capitalist press, reflecting the unease felt by the bourgeoisie at growing working-class militancy and their doubts as to the ability of the union leaders to control the rank and file, fell upon the FAI, as Santillán notes, as ‘the scapegoat for all sorts of accusations and insults’. [75]

Nothing could have been further from the truth. Between 1927 and 1930 the FAI had only a nominal existence. Its activities, in the main, had concentrated on anti-clerical and free-thought propaganda and providing a distribution network for the clandestine anarchist press.

Only after Juan Manuel Molina returned from exile in Brussels to take over as peninsular secretary of the FAI from José Elizalde[76] did the organization begin to experience growth and live up to its reputation as the voice of revolutionary anarchism. Molina’s colleagues on the Peninsular Committee included Merino; an Aragonese militant, Portula; from Barcelona, Luzbel Ruiz; and the Andalucian/Portuguese militant Ricardo Pena. [77]

Molina described the state of the FAI when he took over as ‘unsatisfactory’:

‘When I arrived in Barcelona from exile in the early weeks of 1930, the FAI did not amount to much… When I was appointed secretary of the Peninsular Committee it did not even possess a typewriter or anything. The ancient machine of the Federation of Spanish Speaking Groups in France [of which he had previously been secretary], which had virtually been dismantled, plus an up to date duplicator which I bought, were the tools with which we began the march of the FAI.’ [78]