owners of Barcelona’s brickworks thanked their military saviour for bringing ‘social and political sanitation’ to their city and to Spain.114 The advent of dictatorship marked the end of a cycle of protest that had gathered pace during the world war. For José, however, this marked a new beginning, a time of reflection, clandestine activism, and consciousness-raising that equipped him with the ideas and beliefs that shaped the course of his life.
Chapter Two: From the street gangs of Barcelona
to the anarchist groups (1923–30)
I am a modest writer who emerged
from the fired clay of an oven.
—José Peirats
2.1 The forging of a revolutionary
During the seven years of the dictatorship, Peirats was transformed from a fifteen-year-old child labourer into an enlightened brickmaker, becoming, what was known in working-class circles, ‘un obrero consciente’ (literally, a conscious worker). This conversion, if inexorable, was nonetheless gradual. From age nine onwards, he had assimilated the ‘rough’ culture of the brickmakers, so the teenage cenetista was motivated by adolescent male concerns with sex, hedonism, and football. In keeping with patterns of masculine sociability, Peirats was part of a gang of young brickmakers, the leader of which was tattooed – something which, in the 1920s, was not as mainstream as it is today. They frequented the rowdy bars of Collblanc-La Torrassa and Barcelona’s notorious red-light district, the ‘Barrio Chino’ (Chinatown), in search of diversion and nocturnal pleasures.1 As he later recognised, as a youth, he was ‘submerged in the milieu’.2 Accordingly, his first sexual experience was with a ‘Barrio Chino’ prostitute.3 Even for a good-looking teenager like Peirats, whose delicate features and light brown wavy hair doubtless made him attractive to the opposite sex, it was commonplace for young males at this time to purchase sexual services in order to become initiated in sexual intercourse.4 Since such an act was anathema to anarchist morality, it indicates the limits of his ideological development, along with external cultural and peer pressures. Later in life, he would become a fierce critic of such activities and of all relations bound by the cash nexus.
Shortly after this important rite of passage, José’s personal enlightenment accelerated – a process of acculturation that prevented him from becoming a teenage ‘delinquent’. Driven by ‘shame due to my ignorance’, he moved away from his street gang friends with whom he previously caroused bars and found ‘new friends who always had a book under their arm’.5 The workplace was an important educational arena. Having witnessed the sufferings of a co-worker with venereal disease (a major health problem at the time), he modified his sexual conduct.6 Meanwhile, during a work break, an older brickmaker showed him a book about the ancient Greeks. Appalled by his limited knowledge, José later confessed that he ‘wanted to know the history of humanity’.7 Increasingly, he craved enlightenment as a means of transcending the injuries of class, of dignifying and beautifying a brutal everyday context. The pursuit of culture was also, to an extent, motivated by the legacy of his illness. Never one to back away from a challenge, hitherto he had responded aggressively to taunts from co-workers about his limp. Now, he resolved to gain respect from those around him through ideas and culture.8
José’s cultural revolution was encouraged by his relationship with Pere Massoni, ‘the spiritual father of Barcelona’s brickmakers’ and former Construction Union secretary.9 The architect of the epic 1923 strike, Massoni was a marked man: blacklisted by employers, he was lucky to be alive, having survived an assassination attempt by right-wing gunmen in 1919 that left him with a pronounced limp and progressive paralysis in an arm.10 Subjected to intense police supervision, Massoni lived clandestinely, with an assumed identity, struggling to sustain the union from the shadows.11 Although the CNT was forced underground, it retained sufficient power during the dictatorship to protect its prominent activists. Accordingly, Massoni found work through an agreement between the illegal CNT and José’s employer, although his fellow brickmakers covered for him when he needed to rest due to his injuries.12 Tall and charismatic, Massoni was the author of a short historical study of the brickmakers from the time of Babylon and had a profound interest in culture. A powerful presence in the bóvilas, he was an inspiration for the young brickmakers. According to Peirats, ‘he was our leader, our guide’,13 ‘a tortured saint’.14 Massoni showed Peirats how someone with physical problems far more pronounced than his own could be respected, and his example impelled him on his path towards becoming an enlightened brickmaker.
José’s struggle for knowledge was the beginning of a revolution in his everyday life, a lifelong fight for individual autonomy and personal discipline, to master his own destiny, and to maximise his human potential. He was accompanied in this journey by Domingo Canela, a co-worker three years his senior.15 The pair first met at the Sants Rationalist School and they were reunited in the brickworks, where José, Canela, and his two brothers worked as a team. Quick workers all, they laboured intensely to meet their quota of bricks before taking unofficial breaks to discuss their common interests. Before Massoni’s arrival, this time was spent playing football outside the brickworks; now, they succumbed to ‘the all-consuming fever of books’16 and used their breaks to discuss their readings and politics before returning to work. Away from work, José and Domingo, who had an intellectual air, nurtured each other’s hunger for the written word: they spent much of their money on literature, visiting bookstalls at weekends and exchanging pamphlets, newspapers, and books with each other, as they transformed themselves into committed anarchists. With a camaraderie based on shared ideas, youth, workplace and neighbourhood loyalties, they were inseparable friends for the next decade or so.17 As teenagers finding their place in the adult world, there was a pronounced ludic element to their exuberant cultural activism. As Canela later recalled, ‘It was a bit like a game. We always wanted to joke, laugh, run… and this shaped our activism, which was always both enjoyable and consistent.’18 These qualities were evident in José’s adult activism; his youthful humour developing into a mordant wit that became a hallmark of his writing style.19
José’s socialist uncle Benjamín, who often resided in the family home in Collblanc, also nurtured his appetite for ideas, allowing him access to his personal library and guiding his reading. Under his supervision, José devoured geographical and historical works by Élisée Reclus and Charles Darwin, as well as the literary oeuvre of French utopian socialist Eugène Sue, such as Les Mystères de Paris – readings they discussed together.20 Benjamín also introduced José to theatre, taking him to the Teatro España in Plaza de España to see the ‘social’ plays by José Fola Igurbide, such as El Cristo moderno and El sol de la humanidad, with their subtext of human justice and resistance to tyranny. Since the dictatorship closed off other channels of social protest, these cultural activities acquired great political significance, often ending in impromptu political debates. José was enthralled by the power of theatre.21 Like many anarchists before him, he appreciated its propaganda value as a vehicle for the expression of a collective project, a means by which the audience could assimilate new concepts.22 Throughout his life, he devoted considerable energy to combing the languages of art and protest, organising theatre productions and writing two short plays.23
His cultural obsession prompted him to attend evening classes with Roigé, his former teacher at the Sants Rationalist School, who now taught in one of the union-funded schools that were still tolerated by the authorities. Although José was approaching the age of conscription, his mother was delighted he could hone his writing skills. But the school provided Peirats with more than basic literacy. He was exposed to the masters of Greek philosophy (Diogenes, Socrates, and Epicurus), across to the French anarchist individualism of Han Ryner (Jacques Élie Henri Ambroise Ner).24 Yet, arguably, it was the pedagogical context that moved him most: horizontal classroom practices that transcended social and gender hierarchies, debates fostering the development of powers of reasoning and public speaking, and class hikes in the countryside that deepened his love of nature. This experience was a defining one, giving him his first taste of genuinely free relationships across the gender divide. He even fell
