Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (91 page)

The CNT was unable to operate legally until 1914. Five years later, its membership had soared to one million. Its main period of activity was between 1917 and 1923 when it organized all over Spain revolutionary strikes which almost provoked a civil war. Gunmen or
pistoleros
of the Left and Right shot it out in the streets, especially in Barcelona, and perpetrated revenge killings. But the CNT faced the same dilemma as the CGT had in France, since it was dedicated to improving the conditions of its members in the short term as well as aiming ultimately at the revolutionary transformation of society. At the CNT congress in 1919 it adopted the principles of
comunismo libertario
as its basic ideology, as proposed by the regional congress of the Catalan unions the previous year. It also committed itself to ‘struggle in the purely economic field, that is by direct action, untrammelled by any political or religious prejudice’.
⁷

A split developed between a moderate wing led by Salvador Segui and Angel Pestaña, who were willing to compromise with employers and even the State, and extremists like Buenaventura Durruti who were ready to use virtually any means to bring about the revolution. But what united both wings in the CNT was their common opposition to authoritarian socialism. A delegate returned from a Congress of the Third International in Moscow in 1920 with the news that under the pretext of revolutionary power a new dictatorship, that of a single (if nominally socialist) party, was emerging in
Russia. In 1922 at its Zaragoza Congress, the CNT declared itself to be a ‘firm defender of the principles of the First International maintained by Bakunin’, and broke away from the Communist Third International because of its link with the Soviet Union. The constitution of the CNT adopted the principle ‘The emancipation of the workers must be the work of the workers themselves’. They took it so far to begin with that only waged workers with a permanent employer were allowed to join.

At every opportunity the militant literature of the CNT attacked the State as the source of all evil and denounced political power with such well-known aphorisms as:

Unlike the French CGT with its dual structure of local
bourses du travail
and a national federation of trade unions, the CNT was at first based on the local
sindicatos únicos.
These syndicates brought together all workers in one factory or town and were loosely federated at a regional and national level. It had no permanent officials and the minimum of administrative arrangements: officers were unpaid and rotated annually to prevent them from becoming bureaucrats. All decisions were taken at a meeting of the branch, preferably by acclamation but if not, by majority vote. The constitution of the CNT, which was printed in every membership card, unequivocally stated: ‘We recognize the sovereignty of the individual, but we accept and agree to carry out the collective mandate taken by majority decision. Without this there is no organization.’

Complete autonomy was the basis of the federation and the only ties were the general agreements reached at the national congresses. In carrying a resolution, it was usual to operate by majority vote, but proportional representation was also used to stop the small unions from the villages being crushed by the large unions from the cities. The delegates at conferences had the mandate to discuss fundamental themes but they had to submit the propositions agreed to referendum of individual unions. At all times the members had control over the delegates and could dismiss them.

As a union organization, the CNT was one of the most democratic. But there were some limitations to its libertarian structure. Interpreting strictly its principle that the emancipation of workers must be the work of the workers themselves, initially it only allowed workers who had a wage and an employer to join. This of course excluded self-employed workers, members of co-operatives, certain technicians and intellectuals. Its revolutionary impetus also had an anti-intellectual edge — in its constitution printed on membership cards, it declared: ‘To lose time in talking in meetings by holding philosophical discussions, is anti-revolutionary. The adversary does not discuss, he acts.’
⁹
With its emphasis on the slogan ‘Unity is Strength’, it overruled private judgement and free enquiry by insisting that each member be obliged to comply with majority decisions, even when they contravene his or her own principles. The union also insisted that there should be no public criticism of the organization.

The highly decentralized structure of the CNT however made it extremely resilient. When it went underground during the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera from 1923 to 1930, it re-emerged largely intact.

At the 1931 Madrid Congress, the moderate tendency within CNT carried a proposal to form, like the French CGT, national federations in each industry, in addition to the local
sindicatos únicos
which grouped workers from every factory into a town federation. At the same time, the extreme Federación Anarquista Ibérica (FAI), which had been formed in exile in 1927, began through its loose
grupos de afinidad
(affinity groups) to dominate the important committees and bureaux of the CNT. Its intention was to counter the reformist wing. While all the anarchists of the FAI were members of the CNT, not all the members of the CNT were anarchists. Those in the CNT who rejected the idea of revolution and a movement led by an audacious minority like the FAI began to be expelled.

The result was that from 1932 at least half of the Spanish trade-union movement was being guided by a dedicated anarchist nucleus — Bakunin’s dream of a secret vanguard come true. The FAI succeeded in ousting the moderate leaders of the CNT, including Angel Pestaña and Juan Peiro. They were known as the
Treintistas
as thirty of them had signed a manifesto opposing the tactic of unprepared insurrection, violence for the sake of violence, and the ‘myth of revolution’. When the moderates broke away, criticizing the
dictadura de la FAI
, they formed their own
sindicatos de oposición
, but they probably never gained more than sixty thousand members.

The FAI was also split into various tendencies, which ranged from the supporters of Diego Abad de Santillan who proposed a planned economy run by the industrial unions, to those who advocated like Federica Montseny a free federation of communes. The FAI did not come out into the open
until the beginning of the Civil War in 1936. Despite its considerable influence, it never achieved more than thirty thousand members.

Amongst its ranks numbered not only a criminal element but also a group of puritanical idealists who were the first to advocate the burning of churches and the summary execution of priests and male prostitutes during the Civil War. Although it would be misleading to call these atheist militants fundamentally religious, they undoubtedly shared some of the hatred for organized religion felt by the puritanical sects of the Reformation.

Opponents accused the FAI of trying to seize power in the CNT, but in reality there was no central power to seize and on most issues the two organizations agreed.
¹⁰
In their tactic of using their affinity groups to spearhead the revolution and direct the CNT, the FAI has also been accused of adopting a theory of ‘anarcho-Bolshevism’.
¹¹
Murray Bookchin also acknowledges that the Peninsular Committee of the FAI walked ‘a very thin line between a Bolshevik-type Central Committee and a mere administrative body’.
¹²
It certainly remained a secret organization, with its members carefully selected right up until the Civil War, although it could have acquired legal status after the founding of the republic. The
faistas
were also responsible for many of the revenge killings.

But while the affinity groups of the FAI undoubtedly had vanguardist tendencies, they were free associations held together voluntarily by mutual sympathy as well as ideology. They can hardly be compared to Communist Party cells or cadres with their strict discipline and hierarchy. With their ties of intimacy, they had something in common with an extended family. They often acted on their own initiative, which earned them the nickname of
los incontrolados
amongst the authoritarian Left. In addition, the FAI like the CNT was organized along confederal lines, with the delegated Peninsular Committee executing any general agreements rather than making policy. Trotsky, aware of their differences with Bolshevism but misjudging their true nature, called the FAI and CNT a ‘fifth wheel on the cart of bourgeois democracy’.
¹³

In the early thirties, there were many anarchist attempts to set up insurrectional communes, particularly in the Levante, Andalucía and Catalunya by militants like Buenaventura Durruti. The most famous was in a small village near Jerez called Casas Viejas, where a small group of local anarchists inspired by a veteran nicknamed
seisdedos
(six fingers) locked up the civil guards, unfurled the red and black flag, and announced
el reparto.
After fierce fighting with the Guardia Civil, the rebels were all killed, burnt alive in a shepherd’s hut.
¹⁴

Social unrest grew more bitter and widespread. In 1932 a general strike was attempted in Sevilla and in 1933 there were riots in Barcelona. As a result of an abstention campaign led by the CNT, the Republican-Socialist
coalition was defeated at the 1933 elections. The alternative was more strikes and insurrections, especially in Aragón and the Rioja district. The CNT and the socialist Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT) supported a rising of seventy thousand miners in Asturias in October 1934 which was brutally put down with the help of Moroccan troops. Hundreds were killed and nine thousand sent up for trial. In the
bienno negro
(black two years) which followed, the country seemed to be drifting towards civil war.

The CNT in the mean time had consistently rejected voting in elections with the slogan:
‘Frente a las urnas, la Revolución Social’
(Social Revolution instead of ballot boxes). Its abstention in the 1933 elections undoubtedly led to the formation of a right-wing government. But not all its members were happy with the policy and many voted early in 1936 in elections which brought the Popular Front coalition to power. At the national congress at Zaragoza in May 1936, representing some half million workers, the CNT also welcomed back moderate dissidents of the
sindicatos de oposición
and agreed to try and seek out an alliance with the socialist UGT.

The CNT at the Congress also reaffirmed its revolutionary anarchist beliefs: ‘Once the violent aspect of the revolution is finished, the following are declared abolished: private property, the state, the principles of authority, and as a consequence, the classes which divide men into exploiters and exploited, oppressed and oppressors.’ The revolution, it was made clear, was not only a sudden act of violence but would involve a profound psychological transformation.

The resolutions made at the ten-day congress add up to one of the most eloquent and incisive statements of libertarian communism. It was agreed that the new society would consist of communes, based on the freely associated syndicates, who would produce and exchange the necessities of life through regional and national federations. Elected committees in the communes, without any executive or bureaucratic character, would make decisions regarding agriculture, hygiene, culture, discipline, production, and statistics. There would be no social hierarchy: the producers would meet at the end of the day to discuss questions of detail which did not require the approval of the communal assemblies.

The individual was seen as the cell and cornerstone of all social, economic and moral creation, but the congress adopted the principle of economic communism. Everyone who freely gave assistance to the collective according to their strength and ability would receive from the commune the satisfaction of their needs. With ecological insight, it was further resolved that eventually the new society should assure each commune of all the agricultural and industrial elements necessary for its autonomy, ‘in accordance with the biological principle which affirms that the man, and in this case, the commune, is most free, who has least need of others’.

Tolerance of diversity was one of the keynotes of the Congress. Every attempt was made to incorporate the many shades of anarchist opinion, from the collectivist to the individualist. It was recognized that the communes would take on many different forms, and opponents of industrial technology and advocates of nudism would be free to create their own. As for personal relations, it was affirmed that the revolution would not act violently against the family since at its best it encouraged solidarity in society. But it was recognized that
comunismo libertario
proclaims ‘free love, with no more regulation than the free will of the men and women concerned, guaranteeing the children with the security of the community’.

There was to be no distinction between intellectuals and manual workers, but education would be developed to end illiteracy and help people to think for themselves. Courts and prisons would no longer be needed:
‘Comunismo libertario
has nothing in common with coercion: a fact which implies the disappearance of the existing system of correctional justice and furthermore of the instruments of punishment.’ It was clear to those gathered at the Congress that ‘man is not bad by nature, and that delinquency is the logical result of the state of injustice in which we live’. As for antisocial people, it would be the task of the popular assemblies in a spirit of conciliation to seek the just solution to each individual case. They were confident that when a person’s needs are satisfied and he or she receives a rational and humane education the principal causes of social injustice will disappear.