own political party, evolving towards reformism), the majority consisted of activists with ‘positive values’, such as Joan Peiró, a lifelong anarcho-syndicalist and, ironically, a FAI member. These activists had not become ‘traitors’ or ‘counter-revolutionaries’ overnight, as demonstrated by their eventual return to the CNT in May 1936. As for the radicals, Peirats was appalled by the intolerant ‘FAI sectarianism’, their exaggeration of the revolutionary inclinations of the masses, and their ‘absurd’ insurrectionary ‘adventures’.78 Unlike the leading protagonists on both sides of the split, Peirats lacked the petty, insular spirit required for an internecine conflict.79 If, in terms of the theory that guided him, Peirats was an anarchist (he claimed that ‘I have always considered myself more anarchist than syndicalist’80), his practice remained firmly grounded in the anarcho-syndicalist axiom that the CNT should preserve the unity of all those dedicated to anti-state revolution.81
Years later, with the obvious benefits of hindsight, Peirats concluded that, notwithstanding the genuine divisions of the early 1930s, ‘a third way’ could and should have been found to avoid the split.82 Some CNT Regional Committees, Asturias being just one example, remained in the confederation with an orientation very similar to that of the moderates expelled from the Catalan unions.83 Equally, militants like Eusebi Carbó, who had long represented the most anarchist currents inside the CNT, saw the uprisings as ‘pure Bolshevism’, ‘a cold uprising decreed by order of a circular’.84 A participant in the 1915 El Ferrol anti-war congress, Carbó later rallied against the pro-Bolshevik current inside the movement and, while by 1931 he had embraced anarcho-syndicalist positions, he was clearly no reformist – although he would later occupy positions in the Catalan government during the war. Others rejected the insurrectionist road as it stymied the cultural struggle that would prepare the masses for a future revolution.85 Peirats and the rest of Afinidad belatedly backed this middle road,86 yet such voices were drowned out by the schismatic clamour of the radicals, who blocked all reasoned debate.87
Towards the end of 1932, Peirats’s decision to leave L’Hospitalet and the family home provides evidence of his disillusionment with developments inside the Barcelona CNT. Certainly, this move also reflected the worsening economic crisis, which badly affected the construction industry and associated industries like brickmaking. The split in the CNT had reduced its muscle, making it harder for its unemployed activists to get work.88 As a twenty-four-year-old, Peirats doubtless sought adventure too, so he accepted an invitation from his uncle Benjamín to return to his birthplace in La Vall d’Uixó, where he found work as an agricultural labourer. He retained a deep emotional attachment to Benjamín and La Vall, ‘that uncomplicated world, with its aromatic mountains and its pure blue sky… the fertile nature, without fake adornments and almost bereft of traitorous hypocrisy’. Agrarian labour relations were less idyllic, as José discovered upon entering the miserable world of the rural working class. Despite hopes the Republic’s agrarian reform would improve the lot of the rural dispossessed, José was forced to stand in the square (hacer plaza) while foremen selected the strongest looking hands from a multitude of hungry workers. The experience of rural work changed his perspectives and, years later, he still viewed the agrarian issue as ‘the most urgent of all problems’. Even though he would have a long and exhausting working day, José still found the energy to run evening classes in his uncle’s house. When alone, he and his uncle, a lifelong socialist, had long, amicable debates about politics, each defending their respective position – Benjamín accusing the anarchists of ‘doing the work of the Right’ by destabilising democracy and José denouncing the Republic’s repression.89
This repression increased after the second anarchist insurrection of January 1933. Although organised across a wider terrain – armed incidents occurred in Andalusia, Aragon, Catalonia, Madrid, and Murcia – like the first rising a year earlier, it was quickly snuffed out by the authorities. This was unsurprising. As prominent anarchist youth organiser Fidel Miró observed, following the split, the CNT was ‘losing power, both in terms of its membership and its revolutionary impetus’.90 The rising was the action of an armed vanguard with no real connection with the masses. Peirats later wrote how people were ‘cold, indifferent or afraid, holed up behind their doors’.91 With no organised anarchist presence in La Vall, José followed the march of the movement through the pages of the CNT daily, which he received from Madrid on the days it passed the state censor. Although he had grown attached to the village and its people, after a few months, by early March, the agricultural work dried up and he was restless. For a while, he worked in an espadrille workshop, as his parents had done before him, but the lure of Barcelona, his family, and his comrades – all that gave meaning to his life – was ever more powerful.92
His return to Barcelona marked the start of a new stage in his activism. He completely immersed himself in the organisational life of the anarchist movement, then in open crisis following the second failed uprising of January 1933, which had heightened internal conflicts. These conflicts caused Peirats great personal distress when the wrath of the radicals fell on Massoni, his first important mentor in anarcho-syndicalism and fellow brickmaker and one of the last signatories of the treintista manifesto to remain in a position of influence inside the CNT. Massoni evoked tremendous compassion in CNT circles due to the injuries inflicted upon him by right-wing gunmen, which left him unable to continue working as a brickmaker. In 1930, Massoni was elected administrator of Solidaridad Obrera, a position he occupied with great diligence despite the difficult financial and political circumstances and for which he was later re-elected. After signing the treintista manifesto, however, Massoni became the target of the ire of radicals in the print-workers union, the Sindicato de Artes Gráficas (Graphic Arts Union), whose campaign against him led to the deterioration of his precarious health. The tragic denouement came at the Regional Plenum of the Catalan CNT held in Barcelona on 5–13 March 1933, where Massoni was so unwell that a comrade had to read his report and respond to radical accusations that he had misappropriated funds.93 While there was no evidence to support such claims, Massoni was forced to resign from Solidaridad Obrera. For a noble activist who had given everything to the movement, this was a bitter moral blow and he suffered a heart attack in the middle of the plenum.94 With their erstwhile comrade on his deathbed, the radicals issued a manifesto denouncing Massoni as the spokesperson of all ‘splitters’.95 He fell into depression and died weeks later, having devoted most of his forty years to the CNT.96
His death coincided with the most violent phase of the split, which saw armed clashes between treintistas and radicals, as they disrupted each other’s meetings with coshes, knives, and pistols. Although Peirats was above the mêlée and had maintained his friendship with Massoni, the moderates identified him with the maximalist position; so, when he and Canela attended the funeral, they were forced to leave without having the chance to bid farewell to their mentor. For Peirats, this was a bitter reminder of the pointlessness of this fratricidal schism.97
Meanwhile, in L’Hospitalet, the CNT was effectively now run by the radical Tomás and his cronies. From their insurrectionist perspective, Peirats and his associates were little more than culture-obsessed reformists. As for Peirats, Tomás’s witless maximalism, coupled with his blundering sectarianism, embodied everything that was wrong with the radicals, whose futile uprisings only served to undermine the CNT, the anarchist movement, and the cultural initiatives he so valued.
Afinidad now rallied to change the movement’s orientation. During Peirats’s time in La Vall, Afinidad voted to join the FAI in an explicit bid to counter this ‘insurrectionary adventurism’.98 In particular, they opposed what they saw as the unaccountable vanguardism of the Nosotros group of Durruti, Ascaso, and García Oliver, whom they blamed for implicating the entire movement in their military fantasies.99 Like other groups, Afinidad believed the uprisings were minority actions of armed groups on the fringes of the movement. According to one prominent Barcelona faísta, ‘A considerable number of FAI militants were appalled by their constant use of demagogy and found their coup-style practices less acceptable still.’100 Once in motion, the insurrections presented the movement with a fait accompli, leaving activists conscious of their moral obligation to show solidarity. In effect, Nosotros benefitted from a glorious myth, in no small part fuelled by anarchism’s internal culture,
