several family funerals and was painfully aware of the fragility of life.
It is no exaggeration to state that death stalked the barrios. Besides the pandemic, many young males from Collblanc had been conscripted to fight in the Moroccan War and the neighbours were regularly mourning the loss of loved ones.98 Then, with the eruption of social war on the streets of Barcelona, death came closer to home. The end of the World War I saw the coming of age of the CNT, which had attracted a vast membership: by 1919, it claimed close to 800,000 members across Spain, of which around one-third (over 250,000) was massed in its Barcelona stronghold.99 As the economy slowed down in late 1918, the unions flexed their muscles. With the employers determined to break union power, the post-war years were a time of profound social ferment. A major trial of strength came with the 1919 La Canadiense conflict. Much of the state’s repressive arsenal was mobilised; martial law was implemented and, following the militarisation of essential services, soldiers replaced strikers and some 4,000 workers were jailed. Regardless, energy workers paralysed industry across Barcelona province for forty-four days. Amidst food shortages, power cuts, and torch-lit nocturnal army patrols, the Catalan capital seemed like a city at war.100
The La Canadiense conflict polarised the social context. The authoritarian employers’ association, the Federación Patronal Española (Spanish Employers’ Federation), which represented the most militant elements within the Catalan industrial elite, embarked upon classic union-busting tactics. In alliance with extremists within the local military, the employers’ federation pursued its reactionary utopia of pacifying industrial relations manu militari. In the autumn of 1919, the Sindicatos Libres (Free Unions), a Catholic anti-CNT union with a paramilitary wing, was established with the support of the most confrontational employers and officers within the Barcelona garrison.101 This was followed by an eighty-four-day lockout of some 300,000 workers, lasting from 3 November 1919 to 26 January 1920.102 In November 1920, the assault on the CNT gathered pace when General Severiano Martínez Anido was appointed Barcelona civil governor. Having served previously in Morocco and the Philippines, Martínez Anido ruled the city like a colonial fiefdom, appointing General Miguel Arlegui as his police chief and unleashing a two-year reign of terror based on the ‘law of escape’ (ley de fugas), a programme of selective assassination of CNT militants.103
Like the rest of working-class Barcelona, the Peirats were afflicted by this collective trauma. Close to his twelfth birthday at the time of the lockout, José was shocked by the sight of growing numbers of jobless workers begging in the streets. As working-class consumption declined, so did demand for the espadrilles produced by José’s parents, sending the Peirats into poverty. With food increasingly scarce, the family joined groups of workers who seized crops from the fields close to L’Hospitalet or collected wild vegetables. These trips provided José with his first real experience of repressive policing, as the Guardia Civil (Civil Guard) cavalry pursued ‘the peaceful botanists with their sabres’.104 The intensifying class struggle directly impacted on his life – one of his co-workers was assassinated by Free Unions gunmen and his workplace was full of talk of the CNT and of its newspaper, Solidaridad Obrera (commonly known as La Soli). At home, developments were regularly discussed at the dining table, which the family shared with their lodgers: a communist by the name of Gonzalo and two relatives, José’s socialist uncle Benjamín and his cousin Vicente, an anarcho-syndicalist militant. The lodgers were an important part of José’s political education, as they regaled him with the interpretations of the worsening political crisis from the perspective of the three main leftist tendencies. During long after-meal conversations, he discovered new terms like ‘Soviet’, ‘social revolution’, ‘proletarian dictatorship’, and, for the first time, heard the names of Karl Marx and Mikhail Bakunin.105
José’s cousin Vicente emerged as a new mentor and replaced Nelo as a guiding anarchist influence. Eight years older than José, Vicente was a twenty-year-old baker and CNT activist. A so-called ‘man of action’, he was a member of the defence committees that enforced strikes and had served a short jail sentence for possession of firearms. Upon his release, Vicente’s parents disowned him, whereupon he was taken in by José’s parents. It is possible that Gonzalo, the communist lodger, had participated in similar activities, for he had also been jailed. José used to visit him frequently, as he had done before, along with the rest of the Peirats family, when uncle Nelo served a short stint in prison.106
At a neighbourhood level, Collblanc-La Torrassa was in a state of effervescence. If the dreams of immigrant labourers for a better life were destroyed by the nightmarish urban crisis, the alternative offered by the CNT provided renewed hope. The CNT was arguably the most important structure in the barrio. Building on and refining bonds of kinship, reciprocity, and mutual aid, it forged a community of resistance in the struggle to ameliorate the manifold inequalities of everyday life. For the authorities and men of order, whose grip over this densely-populated area was weak, Collblanc-La Torrassa was a space of fear, ‘the city without law’,107 described by La Voz de Hospitalet as ‘a focus of civic disease’ and home to ‘the detritus of the city’.108
The anarchists, meanwhile, were determined to reshape the local environment and create a social infrastructure of unions, schools, and cooperatives for the ‘new’ proletariat, which, still in formation in the immediate post-war years, would emerge as the decisive revolutionary actor in the 1930s, converting the district into what Peirats described as ‘an anarchist fortress’.109 This was the setting for José’s first militancy and the neighbourhood moulded his perspectives. Living among people deprived of all but the most basic aspects of modern life, he was acutely conscious of their suffering and developed a faith in their essential goodness. It was here that his imagination conceived of a world in which the love of humanity and justice could become the moral core of a new order.
In late 1922, aged fourteen, and having completed his ‘apprenticeship’ as a brickmaker, José became a member of the Barcelona CNT’s Sociedad de Ladrilleros (Brickmakers’ Society). Its parent union, the Sindicato de la Construcción (Construction Union), was the most militant of all the city’s unions, which encadred thousands of migrant workers. This coincided with a union recruitment drive ahead of a planned strike action intended to improve the lot of the brickmakers. Ironically, for all the influence of his milieu and his uncle Nelo and cousin Vicente, José was a reluctant cenetista: he was bluntly ordered to join the union by his workplace delegate or be declared a ‘scab’, ‘and then you’ll find out what happens!’110 Yet, once a trade unionist, he immersed himself in CNT activities, regularly attending the union office in Sants after work, where he met and socialised with other activists and perused newspapers and books in the reading room.
Peirats was radicalised by the great brickmakers’ strike of 1923. Beginning on 28 February, the union sought to establish a stable wage system and suppress piecework, which workers viewed as a denigrating and inhumane system based on the payment of a set ‘rate’ for the number of ‘pieces’ produced. Since employers and subcontractors could manipulate the ‘rate’ to suit their circumstances, they found this form of remuneration extremely beneficial. For the brickmakers, it brought insecurity and unexpected fluctuations in their wages when the ‘rate’ was lowered, whereupon they found themselves working longer and producing more simply to secure the earlier level of remuneration. The strike was bitterly contested and dragged on throughout spring into summer. There were frequent violent episodes, including attacks on strike-breakers and workshops.111 While too young to play a role in the ‘combat commandos [that] settled scores with scab traitors’,112 José was fully involved in the conflict, spending long periods in the union office, the nerve centre of the strike. As union resources became stretched, the brickmakers were increasingly fighting a rearguard action.
When the union ruled that single males could work in brickworks outside Barcelona, where there was no dispute with employers, José, still just fifteen, was sent with other cenetistas to work in Castellar del Vallès, twenty-five kilometres from home, returning at weekends to divide up his wages between his family and the union strike fund.113 But by September 1923, after seven months, the strike was collapsing, only to be killed off by the military coup launched by General Miguel Primo de Rivera on
