was publicly identified with the anarchist movement, frequently invoking its name, Afinidad correctly noted they had no democratic mandate from grassroots assemblies for their insurrectionary politics.101 Afinidad sought to open up a debate on the viability of armed struggle and to gauge the extent to which the CNT and the FAI actually endorsed the insurrections. For Peirats, this was the first of a series of occasions in which he would find himself in direct opposition to the movement’s ‘leadership’. Indeed, according to one critic of Nosotros, Peirats was ‘the main defender’ of the thesis that the group had to be isolated.102
Afinidad similarly rejected the armed fundraising tactics that were central to the radical repertoire. For the radicals, expropriations were another front in the growing insurrection against the existing order that also provided vital funds to purchase arms for their ‘revolutionary gymnastics’. Likewise, armed fundraising offset the decline in dues-paying members inside a fractured CNT, at a time when there was intense pressure on the funds of the Comité pro Presos to assist the rising numbers of social prisoners caused by the insurrections. Meanwhile, for those affinity groups inspired by the anarcho-individualism of Max Stirner, expropriations allowed them to finance their activities and constituted an alternative to paid work – something that clashed frontally with the worker ethos of Afinidad, who shared the anarcho-syndicalist belief in payment for a job well done.
Peirats’s rejection of expropriations was rooted in ethical and strategic considerations. We saw earlier that, in the 1920s, he subscribed to Buenos Aires’s La Protesta, which was co-edited by López Arango, a brilliant organiser and anarchist propagandist, whose denunciations of ‘anarcho-banditry’ cost him dearly: he was gunned down at home in front of his wife and children by a member of the Severino Di Giovanni affinity group.103 Peirats’s direct experiences with Barcelona’s expropriators confirmed his hostility to this practice. Through Ginés Alonso, Afinidad member and co-founder of La Torrassa’s athenaeum, Peirats was introduced to the anarcho-individualist Ágora affinity group, of which Alonso was also a member. After several meetings with Ágora, Afinidad voted to break with what Peirats described as a ‘club of libertines’,104 whose fondness for smoking, drinking, and aversion to work was a world away from his strict conception of proletarian morality and ‘the dignity of flaunting callused hands’.105 The logic of Ágora’s actions was later writ large in a bungled armed robbery at a bar that left one waiter (and trade unionist) dead and most of the group, including Alonso, in jail.106
Afinidad’s frustration with the radical line turned to exasperation following the third insurrectionary essay, which started on 8 December 1933. It later became evident that the Barcelona police had prior warning of the action.107 Peirats witnessed first-hand the abysmal organisation of the rising in L’Hospitalet, one of its main foci. Those Afinidad members who specialised in direct action assembled at Canela’s flat with their pistols to discuss their stance in advance.108 The notable absentee was Pérez, always the boldest of the group, who was part of a team that had successfully executed an audacious plan to liberate inmates from the Modelo prison by digging a hole from the sewers into the building. Though opposed to the rising, as men of action, Peirats and the others were eventually drawn to the streets by the sound of gunfire and the knowledge that their comrades were fighting the security forces. Before midnight, they took to the streets individually, aware the police would be less likely to stop individuals. Peirats later confessed to being motivated by his curiosity to see the ‘revolution’ play out.109
He was singularly unimpressed. Confirming his view that revolution was impossible if the masses were unprepared, he witnessed insurrectionists hammering on doors to rally people, manu militari: ‘Women and children to their beds! Men to the streets! The revolution has broken out!’ When calls went unheeded, the insurgents became contemptuous: ‘The Spanish people live in a chicken coop! With these materials, we can’t do anything!’ Events shifted from comedy to near tragedy, when José was almost killed in an incident that underscored the rising’s shambolic nature. A previously agreed password had been circulated among activists to enable them to identify one another in the streets.110 Fearing the watchword had been leaked to the police, some insurrectionists unilaterally created a new one. With the electricity supply cut off and the streets in total darkness, Peirats spotted an armed group ahead of him and took cover in the doorway of a building, before calling out the password he had been given. He was greeted by ‘a shower of bullets’. When he repeated the call, he was met with ‘the same categorical response’. Since he was drawing pistol fire, he knew this was ‘friendly fire’ rather than the Civil Guard. After some anxious moments, he used his knowledge of the streets to extricate himself from immediate danger. Moments later, he was confronted by rifle fire. Fearing arrest by the security forces, he hurriedly buried his pistol in a plot of wasteland just before being detained by nervy civil guards. Despite claiming he was returning from a girlfriend’s house, he was marched to a nearby café that served as a temporary detention centre, where he found mainly young males, including several comrades. Hours later, after being registered by the authorities, he was released and went home. Concerned he was now on the radar of the local police, he cleared his room of incriminating materials and, for the next few nights, slept at an aunt’s house. His fears were indeed well founded, for the police came to search his parents’ house, seizing anarchist newspapers.111 He was now, therefore, known to the authorities as an anarchist.
Many Barcelona anarchists were hostile to these risings, convinced that the masses were unprepared.112 Peirats and Afinidad were left with a ‘disastrous impression’ of what they saw was a ‘catastrophic’ insurrection.113 In a letter to Aragonese anarchist Francisco Carrasquer, José explained the problem of revolution by decree: ‘One day a comrade would approach you and whisper in your ear, “The insurrection is tonight.”’ On a military level, there was no overarching plan: ‘Each group would fire into the air to proclaim the revolution without a genuine strategy worthy of the name.’114 Instead, it was simply an attempt to ‘make revolutionaries by force’.115 One participant described the rising as ‘a crazy dream… the people weren’t ready’ and the consequences left many ‘people demoralised’.116 Beside the fatalities, the repressive aftermath saw activists imprisoned and a comprehensive clampdown on CNT activities. The L’Hospitalet unions were forced underground and only properly reorganised in early 1936.117 Claims that these uprisings prepared the masses to defeat the military coup of July 1936 are disingenuous.118 As Peirats later observed, the repression weakened the CNT greatly in key areas where the December 1933 rising had been strong (Zaragoza, La Rioja, and western Andalusia), and these zones quickly fell to the military rebels at the start of the civil war.119 Meanwhile, Tomás, whose maximalist discourse did most to prepare the climate for the uprising in La Torrassa, was expelled from the L’Hospitalet CNT after his actions failed to match his valiant words: on the night of the rising, he was curiously absent from the streets and his comrades later found him at home. However, there was no immediate change in the L’Hospitalet CNT’s orientation, as Tomás was replaced by Josep Xena, a rationalist teacher sympathetic to the insurrectionist position.120
In what was a critical juncture in the movement’s history, Afinidad redoubled its campaign against ‘anarcho-syndicalist Jacobinism’.121 Reflecting a growing grassroots rejection of the radical stance, Peirats had been elected secretary of the Barcelona Local Federation of the FAI in the summer of 1933, while Canela was voted in as secretary of the Catalan Regional Committee of the FAI a year later, in April 1934. This left Afinidad members occupying the two most important positions in the anarchist movement in Catalonia.122 Committed to pursuing a ‘constructive’ approach to revolution, Peirats and Canela summoned the architects of the risings – the Nosotros group of Durruti, Ascaso, and García Oliver – to a meeting for them to justify their position to the rest of the movement.123 Given the repressive climate, this clandestine assembly was organised in the countryside outside Barcelona. To Peirats’s stupefaction, the ‘three musketeers’ did not show: ‘There were good comrades, modest, willing, selfless people, but none of the grand figures who roused the masses in meetings as they spoke in the name of the FAI.’124
Peirats called Nosotros to the next FAI meeting, where he intended to propose their expulsion. This time García Oliver and Ascaso attended. Peirats’s
