the first year of the Republic, still just twenty-three, Peirats started addressing CNT public meetings. Typifying the CNT’s loosely structured nature, he learnt of his new role as a public speaker walking down a street in La Torrassa, where he saw a poster announcing he was to speak at a meeting. After hurried preparations, he channelled his considerable nerves into a tirade against the republican authorities, which he accused of defrauding the hopes of the people. He concluded defiantly, stating how, despite growing repression, the CNT would vanquish its enemies to ‘forge a new Spain’. Soon, Peirats found himself addressing CNT meetings across provincial Catalonia. Although he never considered public speaking his forte, relying on notes even later in life, he was capable of improvisation, such as when he arrived at Mollet del Vallès, twenty-five kilometres from Barcelona, to find the mayor had banned the meeting. Rather than face a fruitless journey home, he organised an impromptu meeting in the town square, concluding just in time to avoid the security forces.51
3.3 Radicalisation:
The ‘man of action’ in the streets
The clampdown by the authorities on the anarchist public sphere presaged a new stage of social struggle in which Peirats’s status as a man of action was consolidated. Social radicalisation was inseparable from the growing internal struggle within the ‘anarchist family’. The advent of the Republic exacerbated long-standing strategic and tactical fissures between the CNT’s anarchist, anarcho-syndicalist, and more syndicalist-inclined factions over the relationship between revolution and democracy. For the anarchist radicals, the way forward was through insurrectionary street mobilisations that would imbue the masses with the confidence to topple capitalism and the state. This contrasted with the syndically-focussed approach of the anarcho-syndicalists, who believed that revolution would come through powerful unions inside the workplace. Meanwhile, the syndicalists, who were grouped around Pestaña and those of his ilk and who had been most affected by state and employer repression, were more concerned with gradual economic improvements and were losing sight of the ultimate revolutionary goals championed by the other two factions.
These divisions were often described, albeit inaccurately, as a struggle between treintismo and faísmo. The more moderate treintistas took their name from an anti-insurrectionary manifesto signed by thirty prominent cenetistas in August 1931.52 Consisting mainly of older anarcho-syndicalist activists, including Massoni, they believed the Republic offered new opportunities to consolidate CNT structures. The radicals, meanwhile, were incorrectly named after the Federación Anarquista Ibérica (FAI – Iberian Anarchist Federation), the exclusively anarchist secret organisation formed in 1927 to preserve libertarian purity inside the CNT and coordinate the activities of the myriad anarchist affinity groups scattered across Iberia. The FAI would become the great, frequently irrational, fear of the republican authorities. This position was most identified with the Nosotros affinity group, which included Francisco Ascaso, Buenaventura Durruti, and Juan García Oliver, the mythical ‘three musketeers of Spanish anarchism’ who, after World War I, emerged as the prototype for the urban guerrillas that spearheaded the defence of the CNT in the face of spiralling state repression. From the start of the Republic, Nosotros impelled the insurrectionary line, advocating ‘pendular insurrectionary actions’, armed uprisings that would impede the domestication of the proletariat within the ‘parliamentary fiction’ and create a ‘revolutionary gymnasium’ to prepare workers for the armed overthrow of capitalism.53 Anything else, such as the more union-centred anarcho-syndicalist approach of the treintistas, smacked of reformism that distracted workers from their revolutionary vocation.
Tensions between the two factions grew during the ‘hot’ summer of 1931, when a wave of CNT economic strikes met with accelerating state repression, which sealed the radicalisation of workplace activists and members of the Comité pro Presos, who were most sensitive to the repression. The turning point in relations between the two factions and between the Barcelona CNT and the authorities came after a general strike on 4 September. The stoppage, in support of a hunger strike by social prisoners, many of whom were interned without trial, lasted seventy-two hours and affected around 300,000 workers in the Barcelona area. The authorities responded with a show of strength that included soldiers on the streets, martial law, and the deployment of warships in the port, leaving sixteen workers dead, three of whom might have been summarily executed in police detention.54
As the CNT was further radicalised, so too was Peirats, who attended clandestine activist meetings. His disposition and youth placed him closer to the maximalists, as did his activism in the Construction Union, which followed or, perhaps more correctly, advanced, the radical line. Nevertheless, in La Torrassa, Peirats was at loggerheads with prominent radical Francisco Tomás, who typified the insurrectionists’ maximalism. Some eight years older than Peirats, Tomás was a true militant, a born speaker. Yet he was cunning and bent on proselytising, and bore no respect for any other influence than his own. He had earlier encouraged his small band of followers to boycott the ‘reformist’ Rationalist Athenaeum, as they abhorred cultural initiatives and preferred violent street actions. Meanwhile, the supporters of the athenaeum saw Tomás’s group as ‘a handful of demagogues’, for whom the revolution was ‘just around the corner’; practitioners of what Peirats mocked as ‘tavern communism’ and ‘ballsy anarchism’.55
As far as the CNT’s internal division is concerned, therefore, Peirats and his group occupied an uncomfortable position between the two factions. While Peirats was an anarchist in the streets and in the athenaeum, he was very much an anarcho-syndicalist in the workplace, and this convinced him that the revolution would come through a combination of cultural awareness and revolutionary strikes as opposed to simply firing pistols, like the radicals appeared to believe.
With the breach between the two factions heading towards a split in the unions, Peirats remained unwavering in his commitment towards the CNT. He played a decisive role in the December 1931 brickworkers’ strike.56 The strikers sought to achieve their long-standing goals – the abolition of piecework and the disappearance of the contractors who exploited the day labourers. This, they hoped, would result in a stable wage structure and would allow them to deal directly with their employers, not the contractors, who were seen as a parasitic strata benefitting from the system of payment by results. José was part of the four-strong strike committee and, when the employers refused to negotiate, he joined armed teams that went out to ‘hunt “scabs”’ – an activity that was not without risks since strike-breakers often benefitted from a police escort. Given the strength of the CNT locally, persuasion alone was often enough to encourage workers to join the strike. Employers were less easily convinced. As the strike dragged on, the CNT relied more heavily on its traditional direct action tactics and Peirats became involved in more audacious activities, including arson attacks on several brickworks. Although he never commented on this issue, it is likely that Peirats was now a member of the CNT’s defence groups (grupos de defensa).57 In one incident, he led a group that disarmed a security guard before burning a workshop. Curiously, despite addressing the guard face-to-face, Peirats did not wear a mask, which can be interpreted either as recklessness or as a measure of the confidence felt by cenetistas in a neighbourhood where they held considerable power.58 Perhaps, however, it was felt they could rely on fear alone, since a guard at another local factory had recently been assassinated.59 Finally, the employers returned to the negotiating table, at which Peirats was also present. The brickmakers achieved a partial victory: the employers agreed to dispense with the contractors but the system of piecework would remain. It was an outcome, nonetheless, that was seen as a considerable advance by most brickmakers.60
After the conclusion of the strike, Peirats started working as a baker – a change of profession occasioned by continuing leg pains. In some cases, the consequences of Perthes disease lead to an explosion of severe pain in the early to mid-twenties. For Peirats, this pain seemed unbearable at times, and his condition was further aggravated by the freezing cold of the brickworks. Worsening unemployment, however, meant his new job as a baker drew him into new social struggles. In response to the economic crisis, the CNT practised ‘union impositions’ (imposiciones sindicales), whereby it sent the unemployed into those workplaces that offered overtime to employees or those
