In short, the school experience left him with a set of human values and anarchist convictions that guided his later life.25
He acquired a new set of mental structures – a morality and a way of living, including temperance, all rooted in a deep sense of egalitarianism, camaraderie, and cultural improvement. He found himself hopelessly in love with ideas and their beauty, with an unbridled desire for knowledge and a voracious appetite for the written word; reading had become his ‘vice’.26 He was also endowed with a new confidence that he could overcome the injuries of class and the cultural limits stemming from his social rank. These convictions, as we will see, remained with him: his very existence was inflected by a profound struggle for education and culture, the central values of the anarchist movement that he internalised as the core of his own existence.
His respect for scientific rationalism saw him declare war on all forms of ‘obscurantism’. This included spiritism, an occult, humanist doctrine popular in Catalan freethinking circles.27 Prior to his evening classes, a curious Peirats, who ‘continued in search of the absolute truth with the tenacity of a little philosopher’,28 had been exposed to spiritism by an uncle and an aunt. While he appreciated the moral content of spiritism as well as its hostility to Catholic idolatry and its stress on peace and love, his new intellectual maturity pushed towards pure reason. His final break with the spiritists reflected a different kind of maturity: having become infatuated with a female member of his spiritist group, he quarrelled with her male partner and left.29
Still a teenager, José defined himself as ‘a romantic dreamer. I was always dreaming.’ Faced with a harsh political context, he sometimes retreated into adventure stories, including westerns, as well as travelogues that introduced him to new and exotic habitats. These readings helped him envisage alternative realities, a ‘marvellous world’, and, in walks with friends, his flights of imagination transformed the trees of the banks of the river Llobregat into an African jungle, while the beaches became the landscape of a desert island.30
These last impulses of adolescent play eventually gave way to the desire of a young adult to make his mark on the world: ‘I took on the ambition of becoming someone in life.’31 Peirats created a study area in his bedroom with a desk and built a library, quite literally, as Benjamín had instructed him how to construct bookcases from large egg boxes, which supported his growing collection of Russian anarchist classics by Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin, studies of the natural world and geography, as well as works by Tolstoy, Ibsen, Kant, and Schopenhauer.32
This eclectic collection provides an insight into Peirats’s conception of culture. First of all, his was a non-partisan culture, far removed from the restrictive definition of ‘proletarian culture’ advocated by the official (Stalinised) communist movement in the 1920s; in contrast, Peirats believed workers must embrace and master the culture of humanity. Second, his quest for culture was combined with a deep appreciation of aesthetics – something that went hand in hand with his conviction that the exalted ideas of total liberty were beautifully ennobling for humanity. His craving for art and literature was a means of embellishing his life, a counterbalance to the deadening spiritual slavery of capitalist work. In a way that presaged the later stance of the Situationists, José grasped the aesthetic and poetic qualities of revolution, which he saw as a kind of artistic production: ‘A genuinely revolutionary creation is like a work of art.’33 And all creation presupposed an affirmative struggle against structures of everyday oppression, without which the ultimate act of communal creation would be impossible.34 In sum, his quest for beauty was a yearning for the splendour of revolution, a quest for revolutionary truth. Third, all the above implied an individual struggle. This facet was driven home by his numerous references to the sacrifices of the autodidact:
Culture, like freedom, has to be conquered. A law of compensation dominates life. Without an equivalent effort, nothing is possible. The sacrifice depends on individual will…. Culture does not come begging; it is attained through the open struggle against the bedrock of our prejudices.35
This struggle marked José’s life indelibly. In 1985, four years before his death, he wrote in a private letter that ‘What others may learn with ease, required a titanic struggle on my part.’36 We see here key aspects of his personality: internal strength and certainty, dogged tenacity and fortitude – traits that enabled him to counterbalance ‘the lost time’ of his early life and the ‘deficit in his knowledge base’.37 For Peirats, this was a personal refusal to accept the limits of his social, familial, and environmental circumstances, a rebellion against the cultural condition imposed on him by the state and by capital.38 This endowed him with an immense belief in his own capacity for self-improvement: he taught himself to paint in his sixties and he began writing short stories in his seventies. Paradoxically, this act of will to make culture ‘attainable’ could lead to condescension:
Those who cannot read choose to be like that… The autodidact is a cultural phenomenon far more interesting than all visions of beauty immortalised in treatises and monographs… The autodidact is a flower of life… his dogged and silent labour of filing through the prison bars of his ignorance makes him a hero.39
Peirats unquestionably saw himself in the tradition of earlier ‘heroes’ like Anselmo Lorenzo, the autodidact printer who, more than anyone else, came to symbolise the human qualities of anarchist intellectuals.40 Lorenzo’s example forged a cult of the autodidact in CNT circles. As José recognised, ‘Ninety-nine per cent of the anarchist contingent in Spain is a living example of the autodidact.’41
In certain respects, acculturation signified a desire for socio-cultural advance. In Peirats’s case, ‘I achieved this scratching around in books and I gained respect.’42 Yet beneath an individual sense of self-worth and dignity, there rested a deep sense of humility. It is risible to conclude Peirats was building up cultural capital to enhance his social position or to obtain a financial gain. Had he nursed such ambition, he was intelligent enough to appreciate there were better places to pursue this than within the anarchist movement. Indeed, his initial experience of CNT membership in the early 1920s was enough to show him that his activism would more likely take him to a prison cell rather than a summer house in Barcelona’s bourgeois suburbs. There was also a pronounced social dimension to Peirats’s cultural mission. While he saw anarchism as a vehicle for attaining perfection, his was not a yearning for beauty in a contemplative, passive sense, but at a collective level. Hence, he would read to his illiterate neighbours after dinner, particularly in the balmy summer months,43 and he would always share his new ideas with workmates, neighbours, and friends.
To comprehend fully this struggle for culture, we need to consider the context of the Primo de Rivera regime, which closed off the principal activities of the anarcho-syndicalist public sphere (unions and newspapers) in Barcelona in an attempt to quell the mass movement that so threatened the socio-economic order during 1918–23. Meanwhile, the socialist movement, which briefly cooperated with the dictator, was largely left unmolested, creating a bitter rivalry for years to come. Hitherto, José’s activism had been limited to the trade unions but now, in their absence, he was part of a younger generation engaged in consciousness-raising activities in which they identified anarchism as the ideological lodestar they were to follow in coming years.
2.2. The affinity group
The vehicle for these youth’s anarchist energies was the affinity group, the basic cell of libertarian sociability. It is unclear when José first joined an affinity group but, by the late 1920s, he and Domingo Canela were members of Verdad, a group involved, among other things, in representing works of drama. Created by older activists, Verdad sought to bridge the generation divide and attract youth to their banner by organising theatre productions, the proceeds of which were donated to the prisoner support groups.44 This emphasis on theatre appealed to Peirats’s imagination and he readily joined other members of Verdad in producing agitprop-style productions consisting of social plays and poetry readings, which were followed by a debate. Through these productions, Verdad sought to bring the social issues of the day closer to the workers.45
José
