And it looks as if some scholars have also been drawn to class divisions: “In Valencia and Castellón, well-to-do peasants belonged to the Catholic right or to the republican camp, just as those from fertile Granada belonged to the socialists”.17 But reality does not fit into such deterministic patterns: in Madrid, printing workers belonged to the UGT; in Barcelona, they belonged to the CNT. The Asturian miners were socialists, with a sizable CNT minority, whereas their counterparts in Aragon and Catalonia belonged to the CNT. Dockers in Barcelona and Gijón were in the CNT, but in Seville, were communists.18 This list might be extended to take in poorer peasants who were with the CNT in Aragon, with the home rule republicans in Catalonia, with the UGT in Castile and split between the CNT and the UGT in Levante.
In our own view, there are two explanatory factors at work here. Direct action trade unionism was a tactic that met the workers’ requirements. And that brand of trade unionism came first in Spain and left little opening for other movements to develop.
We need look no further than to a few of its opponents for an assessment of the pros and cons of the Bakuninist-style trade unionism that put down roots in the Iberian peninsula from 1868 onwards. Three witnesses, unconnected with trade unionism (one a republican free-mason, one a soviet Marxist and one a co-founder of the POUM—see note 20 below) have useful comments to make (given their particular outlook and the way they confound anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism) regarding the foothold gained by Spanish anarcho-syndicalism between the late-nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth century.
Anarchism has, very wrongly, been taken to task for its tremendous tactical errors. But apart from the terrorism and individual acts that represent the blot upon its escutcheon what else would have worked in Andalusia? What other school of social thought could, in such a short time, have mobilised the broad masses of wage-earners, that imaginative but uneducated breed, whose apathy yields to nothing except fits of enthusiasm? The socialists’ dusty, cold message, a thousand leagues removed from the hearts of the workers, would have needed a century to rouse the slumberers. Republicanism quickly ran out of myths. Only a doctrine of the religious and utopian cast, with its many fervent apostles, its ardent, prolific preaching, its impulsive sectarianism, its dizzying enthusiasm, its naïve, primitive, simplistic teachings (which brought it all the closer to the sensibilities and understanding of the Andalusian masses and suited it to their psychic make-up and underlying yearnings) had virtue enough to bring off the miracle […] Anarchism sees the social question as a matter of knowledge: in times of conflict and in average circles at any rate, the belief—shared by Socrates—is that one cannot be aware of what is good and then fail to practise it and that error is the source of evil: only out of ignorance of anarchist teaching could someone espouse a position indifferent or hostile towards it. Hence the drive to spread the word and the implicit confidence in the effectiveness of the spoken word. Neither the socialists nor the republicans nor any other party aspiring to win the people’s hearts can stand comparison with the anarchists in this regard. At the turn of the century virtually all of the most highly regarded inspirational works of this school of thought were published in Spanish: a tide of translated pamphlets or originals from the pens of native-born militants pushed the libertarian message everywhere; the anarchist press reached into the furthest-flung corners of Spain; armies of agitators, spurred on by a burning sectarianism, toured the cities, towns and villages preaching the good news […] Besides, their teaching and propaganda were normally shot through with moralistic themes. Respect for womanhood and equality of the sexes in the home and in society, love of nature and of learning, the drive against alcohol abuse, tobacco and gambling are recurrent themes in their newspaper articles and rally speeches. Finally, the Iberian anarchist greedily gobbled up and harnessed to his creed all social trends marked with the cachet of novelty. [Apropos of a strike by Andalusian farm laborers in 1919] the masses were gripped by an ardent craving for knowledge as in 1903. Reading was unrelenting by night in their farmsteads; by day in the ploughed fields, during (smoking) breaks the spectacle was always the same: some worker reading and the rest listening very attentively. A newspaper was the most-welcomed gift that could be bestowed upon a working man who found himself at a loose end. Farm labourers carried some pamphlet or newspaper in their knapsacks along with their lunches. Any one of the trade unionist villages received hundreds of copies of the like-minded press, purchased even by those who could not read.19
Another significant factor in the reinforcement and growth of the anarchist influence in Spain was its very own organisational approach: anarchist agitation was essentially flexible and akin to traditional native forms of organisation and struggle tailored to the needs of revolutionary consciousness and indeed of the less mature masses […] Thus, in Spain, anarchism was not confined to the peddling of social utopianism and terrorist acts. It invited mass activity and scored a number of practical successes. After half a century of growth, that very tradition on the part of the anarchist movement became a serious material factor in the further strengthening of its influence.20
In the forty-one years between the anarchist-socialist split at the congress in The Hague and the Russian revolution, the anarchist movement was fighting a rearguard action in the face of the socialist advance on all fronts (except for Spain and Portugal where anarchists in the nineteenth century, and anarcho-syndicalists in the early twentieth, still outnumbered and outmatched the socialist movement). There are several reasons why the process in Spain was rather different from that elsewhere:
One—Spanish anarchists got the measure of the peasant question long before the socialists, and, right from the outset, anarchism took root in Andalusia, the heartland of the Spanish agrarian question.
Two—Anarchists established their main base in Barcelona, which was the industrial heart of the country, whereas the socialists were centered in Madrid.
Three—The anarchists were formidable and indefatigable propagandists. They published newspapers, reviews and pamphlets galore. At the turn of the century, the Tierra y Libertad (published in Madrid) went from weekly publication to daily and, without question, became the world’s very first anarchist daily newspaper. The Sempere-Prometeo publishing house, based in Valencia and run by Blasco Ibáñez, was offering the full gamut of the anarchist literature of the day at prices to suit every pocket. Socialists never placed any great stock in printed propaganda; they made do with publishing three or four weeklies around the country.
Four—Even though the number of intellectuals belonging to their organisations was very tiny, anarchists pursued an intelligent policy of wooing them, by inviting them to contribute to their reviews and newspapers. The so-called ‘generation of ’98’, which ushered in a whole new era in Spain’s intellectual life at the turn of the century, was intuitively anarchist. By contrast, up until the latter half of the twentieth century, socialists were suspicious of intellectuals, and shunned them.
Five—The anarchists were more ‘up for a fight’ than the socialists. Though, more often than not, crude and wrong-headed, the peasant uprisings in Andalusia ignited the flames of a yearning for liberation, the embers of which never quite died out even in the wake of failure. Humble peasants would gather around those smouldering embers to listen to readings from Malatesta’s pamphlets or Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread.
Six—Anarchists caught on to the importance of educating the young as a means of shaping the fighters of the future. They set up rationalist schools, the chief proponent of which—Francisco Ferrer—added a martyr of international repute to the anarchist pantheon when he was executed by firing squad in 1909.
Seven—Anarchists resorted to terrorism as a political weapon. Though in some instances this backfired, in other instances the outcome was positive, and at all times it was terrifying.
Eight—Relentlessly harassed, the anarchists acquired a practical grounding
