nipped in the bud […] Fascism versus social revolution […] Keep a watchful eye out, comrades!52
18 July 1936 marshalled all the usual enemies against a common foe (with the bourgeoisie and authoritarian left—with the odd exception—lining up against the libertarians).
13 Rosa Luxembourg, The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions, (1906).
14 Charles Gide, La coopération dans les pays latins, 1926–1927 (Paris), p. 144.
15 NEP (New Economic Policy) introduced by Lenin, freeing up individual trading, meaning the petite bourgeoisie, the Party’s economy having proven itself ineffective.
16 José Peirats, La CNT en la revolución española, Tomo 1.
17 Fernanda Romeu, Las clases trabajadoras en España (Madrid 1970), p. 40.
18 According to Según Romero Maura, “The Spanish Case” in Government and Opposition (1970).
19 Díaz del Moral, Historia de las agitaciones campesinas andaluzas—Córdoba (antecedentes para una reforma agraria) (Madrid, 1967 reprint) pp. 447–448, 170–171, 182 and 285–286. This study, which dates from 1923, was not published until 1928, due to the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera, father of the founder of the Spanish fascist party (Falange), José Primo de Rivera.
20 K. L. Maidanik, Ispanski proletariat v natsionalno-revoliutsionarioni voine (The Spanish Proletariat in the National-Revolutionary War) (Moscow 1960), p. 35.
21 Joaquín Maurín, 1964 afterword to Revolución y contrarrevolución en España (1935) (reissued, Paris 1966), pp. 242–244.
22 Galo Díez, Esencia ideológica del anarcosindicalismo (Gijón 1922), pp. 10, 38. The italics are mine.
23 Artículos madrileños de Salvador Seguí, (Madrid 1978), pp. 67–70 [Interview in El Heraldo, a bourgeois newspaper, Madrid, October 1919].
24 Op. cit., pp 135–136 [See Vida Nueva, 12 June 1922].
25 Op. cit. p. 284–285 [A talk on “Anarchism and Trade Unionism” given in La Mola prison in Mahón, 31 December 1920].
26 Ángel Pestaña, ¿Sindicato único? (Orientaciones Sobre organización sindical) (Madrid 1921), pp. 19–21.
27 Memoria del Congreso de Sants en 1918. Nuestro parecer Sobre algunos de los acuerdos adoptados [being the National Committee’s commentary on the Sants regional congress in 1918], extracts taken from Manuel Lladonosa’s El congrès de Sants (Barcelona 1974) pp. 171–174, 179–181 and 184–185. Many of these accords were then passed at the national plenum of the CNT’s 1919 congress.
28 The Alliance (Alianza) was a body that coordinated hand-picked militants to accelerate and further the advances made by the workers, and kept these safe from politicians during the act of revolution, which it believed was well within the capability of the masses. Marx and Engels reckoned that, initially at any rate, the proletariat needed to be committed to the political struggle (for several years or even decades). They did not believe in the capacity of the working man. As formulated by Lenin, this meant that the Party’s role was to introduce the elements of science and consciousness, or order and discipline. Bakunin was opposed to future leadership structures: “Were the International able to organise itself as a State, we, its heartfelt, impassioned supporters, should turn into its most rabid foes”. See Bakunin Crítica y Acción (Libros de Anarres 2006). For this very reason, the Alliance was at no time a party in the Leninist sense.
29 Pestaña declared: “I move that the Confederation should seek for the protectorate zone in Africa the very same political and social conditions as other regions of Spain are to enjoy. That the Moors in the Spanish Protectorate be deemed citizens just as we are, and enjoy the same rights and the same duties and be shown the same respect as any of us. That all our social legislation be enforced there, that the view not be taken that within Spain there is one region whose inhabitants enjoy a lower status […] the impact of this resolution might prove revolutionary in that it might trigger enduring malaise among the Moroccans who are under the rule of other countries”. Memoria del Congreso extraordinario celebrado en Madrid los días 11 al 16 de junio de 1931 (Barcelona 1932), pp. 85–86.
30 José Peirats, La CNT en la revolución española (Toulouse 1953) Vol. I, p. 18.
31 Albert Balcells, El sindicalisme a Barcelona (1916–1923) (Barcelona 1961), p. 69.
32 The POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista/Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification) was an amalgamation of four Marxist groups active since 1930. One had been led by Andrés Nin, who, between 1921 and 1929, had been a supporter within the USSR of the dissident Bolsheviks and Trotsky—although he fell out with Trotsky in 1933 when Trotsky insisted on his entering the PSOE. The amalgamation was supposed to form a CP that would not be under Moscow’s thumb. Amalgamation was achieved in 1935 after a year of fraught discussions with an eye to the 1936 elections. The USSR-backed CP regarded the POUM as a gang of Trotskyist and fascist traitors, and Trotsky regarded them as bourgeois revisionists.
33 Makhaiski or Makhayev took the view that militants of bourgeois extraction were out to seize power for themselves, on the pretext of backing the workers. See Alexandre Skirda Le Socialisme des intellectuels, Jan Waclav Makhaiski (Paris 2001).
34 Not until the 1930s did Federica Montseny join the CNT, since she had previously espoused a critical line on anarcho-syndicalism.
35 Ferrer Guàrdia was a free-mason, and in that capacity, urged a de facto alliance between the atheistic, left-leaning bourgeoisie and the workers’ movement, a nonsensical view in that it involved no real pursuit of social revolution nor attempt to end wage slavery. Free-masons were quite commonplace within the CNT. One resolution moved at the 1926 Zaragoza congress—but not mentioned in the official summary published in exile in France—recommended that free-masons should not hold positions of responsibility, as borne out in the August 1983 written testimony of Manuel Fabra, a free-mason and CNT member, and of Ramón Álvarez, a CNT member hostile to free-masonry.
