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Living Anarchism
José Peirats and the
Spanish Anarcho-Syndicalist Movement
Chris Ealham
Selected List of Acronyms
CC. OO. Comisiones Obreras / Workers’ Commissions
CEAP Comisión de Encuesta, Archivo y Propaganda / Enquiry, Archives, and Propaganda Commission
CGT Confederación General del Trabajo / General Confederation of Labour
CNT Confederación Nacional del Trabajo / National Confederation of Labour
CCMA Comité Central de Milicies Antifeixistes / Central Committee of Anti- Fascist Militias
ETA Euskadi Ta Askatasuna / Basque Homeland and Freedom
FAI Federación Anarquista Ibérica / Iberian Anarchist Federation
FIJL Federación Ibérica de Juventudes Libertarias / Iberian Federation of Libertarian Youth
GAAR Groupes anarchistes d’action révolutionnaire / Revolutionary Action Anarchist Groups
JARE Junta de Auxilio a los Republicanos Españoles / Board of Aid to the Spanish Republicans
JJ. LL. Juventudes Libertarias / Libertarian Youth
MLE-CNT (Consejo General del) Movimiento Libertario Español-CNT / (General Council of the) Spanish Libertarian Movement-CNT
PCE Partido Comunista de España / Communist Party of Spain
POUM Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista / Marxist Unification Workers’ Party
PSOE Partido Socialista Obrero Español / Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party
PSUC Partit Socialista Unificat de Catalunya / Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia
SEGUEF Sociedad de Estudios sobre la Guerra Civil y el Franquismo / Society for the Study of the Civil War and Francoism
SERE Servicio de Evacuación de Refugiados Españoles / Evacuation Service of Spanish Refugees
UGT Unión General de Trabajadores / General Union of Workers
Dedication
For four autodidacts: Gracia Ventura, a living example of human warmth; and Ornette Coleman, Charlie Mingus, and Gil Scott-Heron, musical geniuses and, in their different ways, revolutionaries.
Introduction
There are men who struggle for a day and they are good.
There are men who struggle for a year and they are better.
There are men who struggle many years, and they are better still.
But there are those who struggle all their lives:
These are the indispensable ones.
—Bertolt Brecht
This is a study of the life of José Peirats, of the human foundations of the anarchist movement, and of its twentieth-century history. It is then a study of the affective ties of kinship, friendship, and community that cemented this movement, the most powerful of its type in the world. It charts how the anarchists put into practice their core values of solidarity and mutual aid and the challenges they faced before and during the Second Republic, how they attempted the revolutionary transformation of society during the civil war, and how their plans were disrupted by exile during the dark night of Francoist repression; and, later, how they struggled to adjust to the new circumstances brought forth by the democratic dawn of the 1970s. Therefore, as well as the life history of an individual, this is a biography of a collective agent – the working class into which Peirats was born; it is a case study of the profound osmosis between the most radical section of the working class and the anarcho-syndicalist Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT – National Confederation of Labour), a linkage that ensured that the life histories of cenetistas were inseparable from the organisational history of their trade union.
For Peirats’s generation, the ‘Generation of ‘36’, who rose up against the injustices of Spanish society, the contours and vicissitudes of their lives were inextricably bound up with their activism. For this reason, anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist history is inseparable from Peirats’s biography – his life was intimately and enduringly tied to his revolutionary stance, to the commitments that flowed from his subversive thought, and to the conflicts into which he was drawn. As Peirats noted in a letter to a comrade in 1970, at the age of sixty-two: ‘I’ve done almost everything in the CNT: I’ve organised strikes, organised workers, spoken in assemblies, meetings, and given conferences, written articles, attended congresses, used pistols, and, sometimes, explosives; I’ve been in jail and collected lawsuits, mainly for libellous press articles [delitos de imprenta]. I know what it means to be naked and take a beating in a police station. I was the only secretary of the CNT in exile to enter Spain clandestinely when they were still shooting people.’1 In short, his was a life of subversion and adventure, of permanent resistance to all authority due to his enduring commitment to the cause of the oppressed.
A biography of a figure like Peirats perforce means the reclamation of the historical memory of organised anarchism and its role in the twentieth century. My approach reflects the so-called ‘particularist’ perspective on social movements, which is concerned with the individual motivations and socialisation process of those who make up the movement and which focuses on biography and collective biography as a means of teasing out the meaning of movement membership for the individual.2 Such an approach will doubtless be judged by some as hagiography (an irony as I write as an English-born historian and Peirats was scornful of both the English in general and of ‘professional’ historians in particular).3 For some historians, my approach will be dismissed as ‘militant history’. These paragons of equitableness who triumphantly lay claim to a more ‘objective’ posture by virtue of having a position removed from what they designate as the ‘extremes’ of the political spectrum are either naïve or disingenuous, or both. Behind their claim of ‘objectivity’, those who criticise the history of the dispossessed as ‘militant history’ merrily ignore their own ideological baggage and positionality, all too often hypocritically retaining a blatantly partisan defence of specific political positions, be it a militant attachment to social democracy, liberalism, or, in some cases, nostalgia for Francoism.
I recognise unashamedly that there are many aspects of Peirats’s life that I find admirable. His lifelong struggle in the face of huge adversity to transcend the cultural deficit imposed on him from birth is just an example. I had first-hand experience of this in the hierarchical British society into which I was born. I was the first member of my extended family to set foot in a university. Schooled within a highly stratified British state education system, I bucked the trend among my classmates and was the solitary pupil in my school year to go on to university in Thatcher’s highly polarised Britain.
Peirats was a humble man and, despite suffering significant health problems from infancy, he was a passionate and energetic fighter until the last of his eighty-one years. Similarly, whether we agree with his ideals or not, Peirats’s tenacious defence of his beliefs and his readiness to risk his life and liberty in the pursuit of a collective project that he believed would benefit humanity strikes me as eminently laudable.
